


HELIOKENTRIKOS

by twofoldAxiom



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Ancient Greece, Animal Death, Curses, Fairy Tale Curses, Flashbacks, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Historical References, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Intercrural Sex, Isolation, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Mildly Dubious Consent, Minor Character Death, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2018, Nightmares, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sleepy Sex, Tags May Change, Time Travel, Warnings May Change, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-08-14 02:16:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 53,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16484183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofoldAxiom/pseuds/twofoldAxiom
Summary: Your name is Dirk Strider, and all your life as far as you can remember, which is a pretty damn long time by now, you've lived at this hidden temple to Apollo. You study medicine and music, keep the temple in good shape, say prayers, and occasionally take care of pilgrims who make their way here on religious journeys.Or at least you did, until the temple stopped getting visitors. You'd resigned yourself to living alone out here until Jake English, a young man wandering the world with a curse. He's "questing", he says, but the look of it is he's got no choice.You tell yourself you shouldn't, but it's hard not to bond over curses.(NaNoWriMo 2018 entry, won on November 29 2018, finished November 30 2018.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So hey, this is one of those stories that I told myself I wouldn't do but ended up pulling out of my ass last minute anyway so let's hope it actually goes somewhere lmao. There's gonna be porn in later chapters probably, so look out for that.
> 
>  
> 
> [I used this generator here for the concept.](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator#)

Your day begins thus.

The temple being devoted to a sun god, and these days you being its sole steward, you wake up to the first light of sunrise over the grassy hills. Dawn, not exactly, because it's only when the sun pierces through the pre-morning fog that you actually have to get up and get shit done.

First order of the day, you have a bath. There's a brook with a spring behind the temple, clear and liquid gold at this hour, half-bordered by a mosaic wall. The mosaic must have been a shining work of art back in the day, but now it's worn and flaky with exposure, though the colors are still vivid enough for you to make out the pictures, somewhat. You make a point to meditate on what it might mean, because even now you haven't gotten everything from it. You're pretty sure, in all the time that you've been here, that its pattern changes overnight.

You finish your bath, brush out your hair- and this part you take the time to do, running the pale strands through your fingers and your comb pretty thoroughly until it's all dried in the sunlight, so that by the time you're done the chickens are probably hungry.

You get dressed right there, you brought your clothes with you. You lace up your sandals and make your way around the north side of the temple, where there's a chicken pen and a hen coop that you've constructed yourself. Right outside of the pen, out of reach, is a shed where you keep gardening and carpentry tools and a single bag of dried corn. You have no idea where the corn comes from, just that it's there every morning, and just that it's always and only ever enough for the chickens.

You feed the chickens, and check the coop for eggs. There's five today. Good work, ladies. 

Reaching in, you gather two of them and leave the other three, hoping at least one will hatch and grow up into another hen. The rooster eyes you warily as you leave the pen, and then continues scratching around the corn you'd left in the shallow trough.

You bring the eggs with you into the middle of the airy temple, where there's a large, brass bowl on a tripod. You brush out some of the ash in the bowl, place some new logs and kindling in there, give it a splash of sacred oil- really, chicken fat that you've saved for this sort of thing after you'd figured out how hard it is to start a fire without a little oil- and set it alight with a focus glass.

Smoke, first, and then a spark, and then the fire starts to really eat at the dried grass and wood. It smells faintly of chicken, so you throw in a couple handfuls of incense powder until it stops, and you hope Apollo doesn't mind too much about that as you place the eggs into the fire to cook, and start to sing.

The acoustics in the temple, for a place meant to worship a god of so much _including_ music, kind of suck. But you sing anyway, the same song you've sung every morning for hundreds of years. 

Even as you pluck and strum your lyre, its plaintive croon and the morning birdsong your only company as you pray, you're already thinking of what you'll be doing the rest of the day. There's cleaning to do, because you like the place to be clean, even if your things are strewn in every corner. There's the garden to water and vegetables to check on, and maybe a few to gather for lunch. There's the library to puzzle through. There's your medicine cabinets to restock from the garden and the nearby fields, labels to be written, things overlooked that you might need later.

Herbs to hang up, dry, bottle up or keep in woven boxes. Your lyre to maintain; it doesn't need it much, but it will need it. Honey to gather from the beehives, candles to make from leftover wax. Songs to practice, like more prayers, petitions for the sun to rise the next day, to set on time, for the summer to be mild. The mosaic by the spring to puzzle over at sundown, when the sun strikes it from another angle.

It strikes you, as you pluck the last note, that you _could_ do away with a few of these things, or all of them, or run away, but the thought leaves you as quickly as it comes. You are the last steward of this temple, cursed and blessed with a life tied to the cycles of the sun, and it's an honor that nobody is going to or wants to be able to take from you, a duty that's yours alone.

You pack up your lyre and check the fire. The flames have run down, but you still have to be careful when you pick up the eggs and crack them open for breakfast. You run through the days in your mind, what time of year it must be and whether or not you should be sacrificing one of the chickens in a few weeks. 

It's not entirely a pious thought. Salad, fruit, and eggs just get tiring after a while, as deeply memorized as your morning paean. Maybe you should dig up some nuts while you're at it, and check on your gourds for something easy to carve up for seeds.

~!~

By midday, you decide to take a break from the heat in the garden and set your basket of plant matter in the shade of one of the toppled walls that once bordered the spring, because you do need a dip to cool down, you think, even if you'd bathed earlier. 

You undo the brooch holding your tunic in place and let the cloth fall from your shoulders, and then bend down to start unlacing your sandals, because you don't want to have to make new ones so soon. You settle your things on the same toppled wall, where you can see them in case they fall over or something, and then you lower yourself into the blessedly cool water with a sigh.

It's a nearly-cloudless day, and there's a faint breeze whispering across the grass. You pour water over your head with a small, metal bowl, letting it trickle through your hair and over your face until you feel some of the grease and dirt from the garden coming off. Honestly, given the opportunity, you would spend hours in here, even if it's always cold enough to turn your fingers almost white. 

You scrub your face and the dirt under your nails out, give yourself another couple bowlfuls of water, and turn to get back out of the water and start making lunch. You've only just dressed and picked up your basket when you realize that you can hear something coming from within the temple, carried on the breeze towards you.

Footsteps. Yeah, definitely footsteps; you recognize the soft, scuffling sound of shoes on the smooth stone floor. They pause every few steps, and they drag slightly, so that you almost think you're imagining it when they stop but only because it's been so damn long.

You don't run to the temple. There's nothing worth taking in there, not anymore; the gold has been flaked off the walls over the course of centuries, statues have crumbled, the offering bowl is black and stained, and anything else you can probably replace. But you hurry in your steps, grass and twigs snapping and bending underfoot. 

You're curious more than anything. You know for a fact that it must have been a long way for them to come here. You haven't seen anyone but your own reflection in at least the last hundred years, and with every step you take towards the temple, your curiosity burns brighter.

Your own footsteps are silent as you peer around the corner, intent on announcing yourself and starting on all your questions immediately, but when you spot them in one of the archways, you stop yourself for a few, _very_ key points.

Or maybe just one point, that being that you have no idea what to say to a person like this, apparently. It's been too long since you'd had anyone to talk to. The more you look at him, the more your questions ebb away, with the kind of gnawing nervousness that freezes you in place.

He's tall, maybe taller than you so far as you can tell from this distance, and muscled in a way that suggests he's used to legging it all over the place. He's wheezing for air as he shrugs off a massive, rattling bag piled with what looks like a two camps worth of supplies, and he's looking around with the kind of wide-eyed surprise that suggests he wasn't expecting this place to be _habitable_ , let alone _inhabited_. 

You watch him closely as he drags his bags to a shady corner- not many of those in here, with the way the roof lets in so much light both by design and wear- and it's only when he starts poking through your stuff  that you find a sudden well of both indignation and the realization that, hey, you _can_ replace stuff if he takes any, but you would really fucking rather he _didn't_.

He's picked up your lyre by the time you've silently made your way just a few meters behind him, and then you make it a point to make your footsteps a little louder, your breath a little more noticeable, before coughing behind him when he just doesn't turn around to face you. He nearly drops your lyre, and you narrow your eyes.

He laughs.

"Hell's bells, good fellow, you certainly gave me a right old fright!" He says, carefully placing the lyre back amid your things. When he straightens up, well, he really does have a couple inches on you, and is a lot broader besides. But he smiles cheerily, with straight, white teeth that practically light up the room, and extends a hand to you. "I'm assuming all this is yours, then? I must say you've got a real way with interior decoration, though I don't think I've ever made the acquaintance of someone living somewhere so remote, and that's saying something!"

When you don't take his hand, or answer him, or anything he might have been expecting- not that you really know what he might be expecting, it's really been _that long_ \- he gets to be a little nervous. He makes a short, soft _ahem_ and retracts his hand, wiping it on his shirt, and while he's still smiling it's a little less confidently now. "Right, sorry; I suppose I must look a bit of a scoundrel just about now. I do assure you that I wasn't meaning to take anything here, of course, I was just examining-"

"My stuff." You cut him off, and raise an eyebrow at him. "Pretty sure you're supposed to ask before getting handsy with a stranger's things."

He stops smiling then, and looks sheepish. "Yes, I rather think you're right about that, old chap, and I do apologize. But if that's the case, then maybe I can try to fix the part about us being strangers." Again, he extends his hand; a little more timid this time but still exuding that sort of bouncy, incongruously chipper energy. You can't help but notice the broad palms and calloused fingers, the little nicks and scars and ragged nails. 

He coughs again, an exaggerated one this time, shaking himself at the shoulders to straighten up. "Jake English, my fine sir; modern adventurer, wanderer of the countryside, and would you believe it, a bona fide practitioner of the magical arts."

Well, the part about being involved in magic is familiar, at least, though you don't know what kind of magic he uses just yet. It's a bit of an afterthought right now, anyway: The state of him all road-worn and filthy kind of grosses you out, though, which probably shows on your face and cancels out the effect of being glad to meet someone else with any magic to them. You take his hand anyway.

"Dirk Strider, Steward of this temple, worshiper of Lyceus Apollo." You try to smile, though you're pretty sure it comes out pale and awkward compared to him. Gingerly, you pull your hand away. "There's a spring behind the temple, if you need to clean up."

His smile comes back in full. "Well, thank you very much, actually! I could use a good dip after all the gallivanting about I've done just this morning, and not a chance to freshen up before I'd set off. Lead the way!"

So you do, and he chatters while you do until you stop him at the spring. You still have to make lunch, you think; you mention it to him, and he nods, still talking, as he strips down without any particular notice that you're still standing there and watching him. You certainly don't mind the view, but you hurry back just in case he realizes and does.

You have a whole head of lettuce in the basket, some tomatoes, an onion, some basil. You check your shed for something to cut them up with and are surprised to find pepper and olive oil. 

It's been a long time since it's provided anything like that, or really, anything besides tools and chicken feed. The glass bottles are cool under your fingers, and you stare at them, and out the door in the vague direction of the spring. A sign, maybe?

You take a knife and a whetstone and the bottles, look for a larger bowl than the one you normally use for bathing. It looks like even the magic shed can't do much about that, though, so you hope Jake has something instead. Thinking about it, if it _is_ a sign, you even make your way to the chicken coop and take one more egg, for the offering bowl and Jake. 

All the while, your thoughts are whirling with questions again, now that you've gotten your feet back under you from the surprise of seeing someone all the way out here; if you'll even get the chance to ask them to him while he's chattering, you're not sure, but you haven't felt this kind of insistent curiosity in a long time. It's refreshing, actually, and terrifying: You don't want to scare him off. You want to ask him about everything, but you don't know if he'll tell you anything, and the thought drives you a little crazy as you put the egg in the ashes and light the fire, and pick up your lyre and sing.

You forget the words, and have to make up whole verses. The fire flickers, and you really, really hope that isn't actually a bad sign, as you put down the lyre and snuff out the flames, sweating suddenly in a way that has nothing to do with the heat.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter than chapter 1, but still higher than my word count target, so that's good I think!

Jake finishes his bath and finds you still at the offering bowl.  There's bones scattered amid the ash now, from the chicken bones you'd gathered from long gone meals. You'd carved them up and cast them into the fire, praying for an answer in song.

"What's all this, then?" He asks, as you're poring over them once the fire is out. You don't actually see any answers; all you've got is blackened shards and ash. You're starting to think maybe it wasn't a sign after all and you should just take the pepper and oil and be thankful. Jake peers over your shoulder and whistles at the bones, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm guessing from the look of those eggshells you've got scattered on your pristine floor that something's amiss, don't suppose any of it means that I'll have to be going quite so soon? Not that I'm hoping to intrude of course, I was an indelibly rude bastard at that introduction back there, and I'll be well on my way before I can cause you any more trouble faster than you can say Bob's your uncle."

You snap out of it, just enough that you really take in what he's saying. It might be for the best that he pack up and leave if you're getting weird ideas about the signs and portents that might be coming from on high. You gulp at the thought that you might make a mistake here, after so long, but you smooth it off your face before you look up at him and hold out the blackened egg.

"Here." You say. "I've already offered its essence. We'll toss the actual eggshell back into the fire afterwards."

"Oh." He looks a little dumbfounded at that, looking between you and the sooty oblong in your palm. You stare at him unblinkingly until he reaches out and, with surprising care, plucks the egg out of your hand. He cradles it in his own like a precious thing, and then looks to you again. "Um. Thank you. Er, am I supposed to eat this?"

"With the salad I was making, preferably, but I don't have enough bowls for two." He lights up at that, with a little "oh!" so sincere that you can practically see the realization forming behind his bottle green eyes.

"I've always got a couple plates and forks on me at all times, then, if you really are so set on having me over for lunch! I dare say we're getting a bit late about it, too, why, the sun's already a little past its zenith, isn't it?" He digs into his oversized pack as he speaks, not even really looking at it while he fixes his gaze on you. "Come to think of it, I don't want to impose any further than I already have, but with it getting to be a little on the later side of the day, and with any settlements being so far off at this rate- really, your lovely abode and yourself have been the first signs of civilization I've seen in about a couple weeks on foot- would you mind so terribly much if I stayed a night or two to get my bearings? I'm not about to freeload either, I'm sure I've gathered something in the old mobile hoard to trade with if you're interested, or I could help you around with whatever you do to keep this place so spic-and-span."

You make a show of thinking about it while you watch him, and he watches you expectantly while still digging through his things until he finds what he's looking for. 

"A- _ha!_ " He crows, as he slides out a couple tin plates and forks with a flourish. "So what do you say, old chum, would you be amenable to something like that? If not of course, just say the word and I'll be out of here in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

You've already decided you want him to stay, but you don't want to seem desperate. You are desperate, deeply so, because his cheer is infectious and his voice is just the right side of boisterous for you, and his presence is warm and welcoming in a way the sunlight that floods the temple never was. You take the offered plate and fork from his hands and run your thumb very gently over his knuckles.

You could swear you feel a shiver.

"How about we eat first and I think about it while we do that?" You say. "And you can ask as many questions as you like, if you let me do the same." You pull your hand away, slowly, with one last caress that you hope isn't entirely too forward for you, it's not exactly easy to tell with these sorts of things after about two hundred years of nothing but your imagination.

He licks his cracked lips, just a flicker of tongue over them before he focuses on you and hums something sounding faintly amused to himself. He turns his hand over before he claps both hands together and straightens up again.

"Sounds positively perfect to me!"

You don't smile back, but you lead him to the back of the temple where you actually cook, study, and sleep. He wonders at the bottles and boxes on every available surface, and your pressed herbs and faded, yellowing manuscripts.

"Why, these must be worth a fortune to a museum somewhere!" He breathes, careful to keep from actually touching anything. One scroll, a list of your inventory that you check so often the paper's cracking and fraying where you've gotten your fingers all over it, he leans in close as he can to try and read your chickenscratch. "All written in actual ancient Greek, too; that's going to be a real challenge to puzzle out. How long have you been trying to translate them? Any idea how old they might be?"

A little off to the side at one of your tables, you're sharpening the knife, but it doesn't need much more than a little touching up. You don't raise your head as you pick one of the tomatoes out of the basket, carefully slicing through the firm, juicy flesh. "Not that old. Translating to what?"

"Well, I don't know, English? Modern Greek, maybe? I can't quite place your accent, actually, now that it's come up, but I'm a bit rusty in the older areas myself." You hear him as he shuffles around, maybe to get a look at something else in the room. "You play the part of the mysterious temple wraith so well I half expect you to drift through the walls, at least until I get a better look at how well you keep the place. And that grip of yours, of course."

You slice the last section of tomato and tip it all into the beds of lettuce you'd separated onto the plates, and then get started on the next tomato. "Actually, I understand it just fine. Some of it's a little archaic, I guess, even for me, but the other temple stewards were pretty old by the time I was brought here. Some of it I wrote myself, you can tell because the paper's not so crumbly."

"Huh?" More shuffling, and something being carefully put back into place. "What do you mean?"

You shrug, still slicing. "I mean there were more of us here, I guess it's been a pretty long-"

"No, I mean about writing some of it yourself." You hear something creak as he sits down- you assume he's gotten over his fear of touching everything in the room and picked something up to go over while he's seated- before he speaks again. "Using the letters as code, right? I'm sure I can figure out what you've put down here if such is the case."

"No code. Nothing that I put in on purpose, anyway." He makes a puzzled noise as you tip the next sliced up tomato into the food, too, and then start working on the onion. At that point, you look over your shoulder at him; sure enough, he's trying to squint at one of your notes; the paper hasn't fallen apart in his fingers so it's definitely yours.

He looks up at you in something like curiosity, and something a bit warier than that, though he's got it masked behind his usual brightness in another moment. You slow down slicing the onion and feel a tightness in the back of your throat at the thought that he might be realizing just how old you are, and the fear that comes with that.

Thankfully, he doesn't point it out if he has. He picks up something else, a bottle of slightly crushed leaves, trying to puzzle out what it must be without opening it. "So what ever happened to the other stewards, anyway? I don't suppose you've been living alone all this time."

"No, I have. But I'd like to ask you some questions now, too, if you're alright with that." You hope he doesn't notice you dodging, or if he does, that he plays along. You roll your questions around on your tongue before you decide on one; it's always hard to pick one to start with.

"Where did you come from?" You finally say. It's a good place to start; gives you a little background on your guest, and a little information about what the world is like beyond your immediate surroundings.

He chuckles, a little too sharply. "Oh, you know, here and there." He says. When you frown at him, pressing him to go on, he gets to looking very interested in your teapot. "Oh! Glad to see someone else here who likes tea, I have a tin of loose leaf somewhere in my pack if you're interested. This far away from it all, I've missed having a good cup of grey with some company, though I'll take just about anything at this rate. Local flavor is more than welcome."

You huff at the non-answer, but flick your head in the vague direction of the river. "Fill up the pot there. If you have any way with fire magic, you're welcome to use it, or if you don't, bring it back here. I have _sideritis_ and lavender, and a few other things in those bottles. But come back with the water first."

He nods and gets up, carrying the pot with him and whistling as he makes his way to the river. You arrange the tomatoes and onions on the leaves, and then take the bottle of peppercorns and tip a few into your mortar with a sprig of dill and a splash of oil. It grinds easily under the pestle, and you lose yourself a little in just turning the mortar in your hand to evenly crush the herbs.

Jake still hasn't returned by the time you've finished fiddling with the salad. You frown as you wait for him in the main area of the temple, where the sunlight filters through holes and slots in the ceiling and the statue of Apollo stands over everything, looking straight forward towards the rising sun. His face is in shadow right now, the day crawling by.

You look up at him and think about how long you've been here, that the statue had once been in living color, and now it's all pale marble. You turn the leaves over in your portion of salad and start getting annoyed. Jake still isn't back, and your stomach is starting to complain at the lack of food. Breakfast feels like an eternity ago.

You stop sitting around and get up, finally, when your stomach rumbles for the third or fourth time. You carry the plates carefully, and when you head outside and cast your eyes around, you realize something has gone wrong.

Jake is nowhere in sight, and you know you'd left him alone for a while, but all his things are still in the temple. You start to worry that maybe he'd fallen into the water; the brook is shallow, but swift, and the bed is slippery. You walk towards the stream, passing by your shed, your chickens, your garden.

You don't even get all the way to the stream before you find your teapot, water seeping into the thirsty earth where it's fallen on its side. It's not so close that Jake could have slipped, but you don't see him anywhere, and there's no reason he would be running without his things or the teapot, is there?

"Jake?" You call out, once, and then a little louder. "Jake! Is this a joke?"

No answer, but you still have two plates of salad and all his things. You pick up your teapot, feeling some kind if disappointment and dread, as you head back to the temple still wondering where he'd gone. The shadows seem darker now, the whisper of the grass underfoot like grasping fingers and blaming voices.

You can't finish both servings, so you feed the leftovers to the chickens. There's still some time in the day yet, still some light, though you'll have to be careful with your candles. You check on the beehives and gather honey. You read an old, favorite scroll, left by one of your predecessors. You strum a slow, plaintive tune with your offering at dinner, the lyrics half-memorized, half made up.

Had he been taken by something? Some monster, rising out of the water to snatch him up in silence? When you settle in to sleep that night, just an hour after the last rays of the sun when the air is still warm and the crickets just starting to murmur, you wonder what you must have done to chase him off.

You can't think of anything you could have really done, and your traitorous spin possibilities for what you hadn't done instead. Maybe you should have answered his questions, or not asked him your own. He'd sounded uncomfortable and tense, and that was when he'd left.

You fall asleep fitfully, slowly. You dream of a nymph singing him to his doom, maybe so you don't feel guilty, but it makes you feel worse.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a monster, I did not expect it to reach over 3k words lmao.

Your day, usually, begins thus.

The morning light strikes the temple as it crests the surrounding hills, illuminating the face of your patron god and, shortly after, your own face through a hole in the wall that lets in the light.

You get up, have a bath, feed your chickens, sing a morning greeting to Apollo, and eat breakfast. You think about what you'll be doing the rest of the day, sacred duties that you've kept for hundreds of years since you were a child, and then, since you were left to be the only steward when everyone else abandoned the temple or died.

You don't know how much time has passed beyond the shallow valley of this place. You don't even know if anyone remembers you, or your god, or the home you had before being brought to the temple. You barely remember, but for the sting of snow and seasickness and then the bright shores of Crete, the long journey to the temple in the night before being brought into the sunlight before Apollo. You don't remember your parents as more than a distant fog.

You think of Jake.

He feels like a dream in the morning light; a strange man who'd stumbled into the place claiming magic in his blood, and he was handsome and bright and drew you into his smile with an unknowable, unforgettable warmth, like the first time you'd glimpsed the sun-drenched hills.

It shouldn't ache half so much, knowing him for half a day and losing him just as quickly.

Your day actually begins much later.

You lie in bed as the light of the sun crawls across the room, and it's only the wrath of your chickens and the potentially that of a slighted god that drags you out of bed at last. As you squint in the mid-morning sunlight, about as groggy as you expected to be after your frankly _shit_ rest last night, your thoughts wind back to the day before. You pick it apart over and over and more and more it feels like a dream, conjured by a loneliness that's come out of nowhere.

By lunch, you consider what gourds are ripe for the picking and come away with a small squash, dense and heavy and vividly green. You're thinking of making soup with it, when you come into your little kitchen and find inescapable proof that Jake wasn't a figment of your imagination.

Four of them, in fact, two gleaming in glass bottles of pepper and oil, and a tin plate with a fork. You put the squash down and pick up the bottle of peppercorns, tilting it this way and that to watch the little black seeds roll around behind the glass.

You feel your hands shake like a distant thought, and you carefully put the bottle down. A drink would be nice, you think; to clear your head, and to forget about Jake, and you're a bit sweaty besides. The proof may be undeniable, but it doesn't change the fact that he's nowhere to be found. You still have lunch to make. You still have your duties to attend.

You think about this for exactly as long as it takes for you to get back outside into the main area of the temple, to gather up Jake's things and toss out whatever bits of junk you can't use for yourself. You stop thinking about it because you hear him call out to you.

"Dirk! Boy am I glad to see you; can you fetch a ladder perhaps? Take your time, no worries there, I've got nowhere else to be right about now!" You look around and you can't see him, but that voice was definitely his. Are you hallucinating?

"Jake...?"

"Up here, old chap!" He calls out again, and you look up until you spot him. It's a bit hard to spot him at first, you have to squint at where he is, and then your eyes go wide in disbelief. 

He laughs, brightly, but you can hear the edge of terror in it, because he's clinging to the curve of Apollo's bow, and it's a pretty good way to the ground that you don't think anyone would want to jump. "I'd get myself down right quick if I had anything to get myself down _with_ ; I left all my rappelling gear in that bag from when I was last here! Quite embarrassing, really; I wasn't expecting to have to pop off again in such a hurry!"

Rope and hooks, better than a ladder; you don't think you could get a ladder up there. You hold up a hand and look around for his things, honestly just fucking mortified that he's up there, and confused how he got there in the first place. You would have noticed if he'd been there before, right?

"How did you even get up there?" You ask, as you drag his bags over and start laying things out in front of you, looking for the rope. He has a lot of miscellaneous junk to pick through, some recognizable, some not. You spare a moment to feel guilty about deciding to just go through his things earlier, and then you brush it off; you can stew in it later, but right now you need to get him off this statue.

"It's the darnedest thing, isn't it? One moment I'm heading back to you with a full pot of water, and the next I'm in the middle of a busy street in Time's Square! Don't think that's ever happened before, not so far away at least; I know these temporal winds can be a tricky thing to finagle but I did think I was starting to at least get the hang of it." You look up at him, still clinging to the statue's bow but his shoulders are a little less tense as he goes on about... what was that? Temporal winds?

"Oh, yes, that; well that's really all out of the bag now, isn't it? I'll have to explain in depth, but mostly I had to make a couple turns looking like a crazy person until I found somewhere I'd recognized, and then it was just a matter of pretending I'd gotten turned around waiting for someone. It's just a good thing I always kept my cards on myself no matter what century this twice-blasted curse spits me out in, or really, I'd have no way of dealing with any of it!" It all sounds pretty confusing, but you're sure you don't show it as you finally find his rappelling gear and try to figure out how to get it up to him.

You figure you should just throw it. You bundle some of it into a weight at the end of the stiff, glossy rope, a weird, glossy green that you don't think is really possible in any hemp even with dye, and swing it over your head until you have the momentum to get it up there. You release and nearly hit him in the head, wincing when he yelps in surprise.

"I'm fine!" He hurries to say, before you can try to throw it again. He's slow and careful, obviously straining to keep his legs around the statue's wrist while he gets the ropes and knots and whatever else he's got ready. He takes a few deep breaths and tests the way the rope holds, and you have to _physically resist_  chewing your nails when he makes the first jump.

The rope holds, thankfully.

You still end up chewing your nails until his feet are firmly planted on the ground, and he does some kind of complicated twist with the rope and it comes undone.

(That does nothing for your nerves right there, just nothing good at all.)

"Well, that was certainly a messy start to the day, wouldn't you say?" He says, turning to face you. You clap your jaw shut as he does, and run a hand through your hair, trying to look calm as he untangles himself from his harness. "Sorry that I must have given you a real scare, but I suppose that's an even enough thing for how you snuck up on me about a week ago by my reckoning."

"A week ago... I didn't know you a week ago. We met yesterday." He stiffens in surprise, and then sags resignedly, picking up his ropes, and you feel like you've just swallowed your foot all the way to the ankle. You change the subject. "You mentioned something about temporal winds, and a curse."

He pauses as he's bundling up the rope, and then continues winding it all together. "Indeed I did. They're kind of a long story, and not one I'm of a mind to tell often, either. Though I suppose you've been a real gentleman enough to me, if a little frayed around the edges, and I did so abruptly drop your teapot back there. It's not broken, is it?" 

You shake your head about the teapot. He finishes bundling up the rope and stows it back in his bag, giving the massive, bulging pack a light pat. "Well, then, I think that should do it. Do you still have a mind to share stories over lunch?"

"Hmm." You cross your arms, scuffing a sandal over the tile underfoot. But what's the use, if he's probably going to disappear in a few minutes? "Yeah." You say. "But I'm going to walk with you if we're getting the tea ready, this time."

He bends to crack his back and neck, then rolls his shoulders and claps his hands together. "Alrighty, then! What's on the menu? I have a bit of jerky and some canned meats I could share in my trusty bag here, if any of that sounds appealing and perhaps you haven't gone through it? You can have the sausages all to yourself either way, I'm getting a bit tired of good old Viennese processed meat product."

"I didn't touch your things, but it's probably still a good thing you came back when you did." You have no idea what Viennese meat product is, but it's been a long time since you've had any meat besides chicken and freshwater fish anyway so it'll be a welcome change, whatever it is. That, and you're itching to ask what exactly happened to Jake, if he can tell you over a meal. 

You don't intend to let him out of your sight like you did yesterday, at least until you get answers.

~!~

Viennese meat product comes in a small, metal jar that Jake pops open with some kind of attached lever. There's seven of them, arranged in an almost flower-like pattern in the jar, floating in oily, salty broth. Jake looks disgusted when you slurp the broth up, and frankly, you don't blame him, but you don't really know what else to do with it.

The sausages are better, but definitely no sausages you've ever had in your life, the texture entirely too soft and even. You eat two and chuck the rest in the pot you have simmering on the stove, with the softened squash, spices, and herbs all mashed together. Jake tells you his story as you cook, and you keep looking between him and the pot, making sure he's still there.

"The thing is, I'm pretty sure, it's been an awfully long time since I've had any sense of where I came from, though I do remember it being perhaps a little after some queen or other died in my corner of the map. It was a bit hard to tell when most of what I did was run off to faraway lands with my grandmother and her little coven. Or rather, I tagged along with the lot of them, making a right nuisance of myself as I got into all their gatherings and events and very nearly had them exposed- it would have been a great scandal to them, mind you- until they decided it would probably shut me right up if they let me join formally."

"So that's what they did, actually; they let me join in and I got a secret word to tell them if I found something interesting and I'd even been given a familiar spirit of sorts, this great, lovable beast of a Samoyed I named Halley for the short time I knew him. But that's getting into details I suppose you wouldn't be interested in; he was a great dog, but I really should move on from that point."

"It was a trip, or perhaps you could say an expedition or pilgrimage of sorts, to an island somewhere in the Pacific that cost quite a lot of money to get us all there, but that meant quite a deal of hullabaloo to the entire coven, my dear grandmother included. Well we made our way safely and a little seasick despite the danger that I'm sure could have beset us at any time during the trip, but it was in the dense, sweaty jungle  that things took a turn for the sour."

You taste the soup as he takes a breath and frown, adding a pinch or two more of chili. It's satisfyingly hot when you try it again. He watches, waiting, and you wave the ladle at him to continue.

"Right, right, where was I? Oh, yes, seasickness, sweaty jungle, all that is well and good, except for the jungle I suppose. Now I like a good bit of adventure as much as any young man should, but I hadn't entirely made myself familiar with all the flora and fauna that would be there in the first place, or in fact, the flora and fauna that would be accompanying us during the trip."

"So there I was, right in the middle of the night, wandering the perimeter as I'd taken it upon myself to be the noble guard to these lovely ladies- not that they probably couldn't have whupped my fool self seven ways to holy Sunday with those handbags of theirs should they have chosen, or worse being that they were quite literally all witches- when all of a sudden I'd come upon the largest, most fearsome-looking serpent I'd ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes upon!"

"Well, alright, maybe he wasn't so fearsome-looking, but he _was_ massive, easily the length of a bus and the width of a large man's thigh, and the wicked way those eyes gleamed in the dark- well, it's a wonder I myself didn't die of fright! Any lesser man probably would have, I'm sure, though perhaps a lesser man would have also turned tail and fled instead of doing what I did next."

"You see, the coven, they're the genuine article, and normally they wouldn't take any random hobbledehoy who can flash a winning smile to get out of a little trouble, and maybe that's where it all started because I really couldn't match the lot of them in any kind of magical malarkey."

"So of course, to make up for it, I always made sure to carry a loaded revolver pistol, just in case." 

He chuckles, a pained, humorless noise. "And normally I'd be all for being the rakish young fellow who shoots first and asks questions later, but in this particular instance, it means I was the rakish young fellow who shot Aunt Evelyn's familiar spirit and sent it beyond the proverbial veil. Permanently."

He pauses again, though you're not sure if he's waiting for you to tell him to keep going or if he's just too ashamed to keep going, so you ladle the soup into a bowl and your largest cup and leave the rest of the pot on the stove to keep it warm. You carry the soup to him and offer him the bowl, which he gladly takes and stares into like maybe he can divine where his life went wrong in it.

You sip from the cup, careful not to burn your mouth, though the pepper still makes it tingle a little as you do. "What does that have to do with your curse?" You ask him, and he sighs and takes a gulp of his own soup to maybe have something to do that isn't answering you, before he gasps and hisses as the heat hits. You pass him a different cup, full of cool water, because you'd decided you didn't want to make tea with hot soup.

He thanks you and gulps it down, hissing through his teeth. "That is some powerful stuff."

"Jake." You say, gently, and he finishes the water before settling in.

"Alright, alright, well, I killed Aunt Evelyn's familiar and the shot woke up everyone in our camp, and nobody was exactly happy to see what had gone on there, least of all Aunt Evelyn. Jesus never wept so hard in the garden of Gethsemane as she did that night, it was like I'd shot her myself. It's a grave thing to so much as injure a familiar spirit's physical form, you see, so even though I'm the grandson of the coven's founder, well, they couldn't very well let me off easy, could they?"

"So Aunt Evelyn, with my grandmother's permission, she was the one who thought of the curse to put on me. A wandering curse, of sorts, a little like just being normally exiled, but with a twist that I get tossed about through the timeline at random, always looking for a replacement for her familiar. I'm sure she just wanted to get rid of me, you know, but it can't really be helped now. I wander the earth and slip between the cracks of centuries, and maybe someday I'll find my way back home and see how everyone is doing." 

He takes another sip of his soup, slower this time; it's probably still a little painful for him, because he takes another gulp of water. "Hell's bells, you really do like your hot peppers, don't you?"

"It's what keeps me going." You shrug, and have more for yourself. You don't say anything more, but neither does he, for a time, and the two of you lapse into a kind of understanding, if  maybe not comfortable, silence. He's the one who breaks it first.

"So what about you?" He asks. "You don't look or sound like your average ancient, and your name is completely off the local map, though you certainly dress and write the part, and if you saw me just yesterday, why, it's nowhere near the age of antiquity anymore. You're a bit of a mystery man yourself, aren't you?"

He leans in again, eyes bright. "How about it, old chum? I told you my reason for being a little off the wall, you tell me yours?"

You turn your cup in your hands, thinking on it. Where would you even begin? But he's right, it'd only be fair. You finish the soup in your cup and get up, ladling more into t before sitting back down.

"I'm the steward of this place, this temple of Apollo." You say. "The last remaining one here, at the very center of Crete, and I always will be so long as I remain on the temple grounds. I don't know how to explain the rest, how you understand what I'm saying but not what I write. But if you can stay a while, you're welcome to help me with my duties, and maybe we'll learn a few things about your curse, too."

He cringes at the reminder. "Well, I suppose it can't hurt to try. And perhaps you can petition that bright and shining god of yours to give me a hint, at least, of where to go next." And then he raises his cup of water in something like a toast, and finishes eating.


	4. Chapter 4

You fully expect him to disappear again, in the night or as soon as you open your eyes. You wake up before he does, and at first you think it's going to be the same as the day before, but you hear someone's breathing besides your own and realize you aren't alone.

Slowly, you slide partway out of the cot and turn to look at your guest lying in his bedroll on the floor. Jake had insisted that you'd already done so much for him, feeding him and letting him take refuge in the temple, that he couldn't bear to take your bed despite your own, milder protests. You're pretty sure he just wanted to be within grabbing distance of his things in case he disappeared and ended up somewhere he might need them.

It's strange to have someone else in the room after waking up on your own for as long as you have. You sit for a while, just watching the rise and fall of his chest, and shake your head as if shaking cobwebs out of your hair. The morning air feels heavy and wet, in the way that it does when it's going to be a hot day, so you'll have to make sure to get your heavier work done before the heat sets in.

You check the angle of the rays falling across the wall, marking off another week's notch, and you go outside with your bathing things to the spring. You don't mind letting Jake sleep in, though you're still burning with curiosity over his coven, what the places he's seen must be, how he might find a way back; you just hope he'll still be there when you go check on him.

A little voice in the back  of your mind asks you if you want to go with him.

You push it aside. You belong here, in the temple, as constant as the rising and setting sun, and besides that you wouldn't feel right abandoning your bees, or your garden, and especially not your chickens. You push yourself under the water to rinse off the soap in your hair and come up gasping; even as it gets warmer, the spring is always achingly cold, and it helps you clear the voice from your mind. 

There's still soap in your hair. You dunk down again, run your fingers through it until you can't feel the herbal slime and oil clinging to your scalp, and then you come up for air with a gasp, shivering as a breeze passes between the crumbling walls around the spring. Trickles of water slide off your hair, drops falling into the water around your waist. You curl your toes in the algae and sand, steadying yourself a little.

You're about to start scrubbing when you hear a sharp whistle from your left. Jake strides purposefully towards the water with a rough cloth, a razor, and a mirror, and waves when he can see you properly, still in yesterday's clothes but without the little glass mask over his eyes. 

"Could have woken me up too, you know; normally I'd be up at the crack of dawn myself, but I guess yesterday's episode took more out of me than expected!" You blink more water out of your eyes as he pauses at the edge of the spring and lays his things beside yours on the wall. He peers at the mural closely, humming to himself as he strips down, and you can't really help but follow his broad hands as they peel his clothes off his skin and reveal a body that could have been sculpted by the same hand that made the statue in the temple. Better, probably; more alive than the marble, if nothing else, though perhaps more flawed, too.

You feel yourself flush. Those flaws only draw you in. You find yourself examining the scars and pockmarks here and there, and the smatterings of dark hair on his arms and legs; they serve to remind you he's mortal, that he's here beside you and you're both nude, with nobody for miles, and you've been so _very_ alone.

The water seems a _lot_ colder and a lot less forgiving than usual. You pour some over your head while Jake gets in, but you find yourself watching him out of the corner of your eye. 

" _Brrr!_  A little brisk, isn't it? I'd thought it'd be less chilly this time around but it looks like my memory didn't fail me in the slightest from the last I'd been in here. Have you ever considered a shower pail? Though, I suppose that would be a bit hard to set up on your own, at least if you wanted a good, long wash to get the grime off properly." You don't think you've ever met anyone who'd taken to speaking so much in the bath. He pours some of the water over his head, his dark hair falling over his eyes as he goes on. "I'm sure this is all very humdrum for you, but after a week with indoor plumbing it really is roughing it for me. Granted, I'm not so soft yet that I can't do away with a small luxury like hot water in the mornings. A pot of tea and breakfast and we can get right on to... whatever it is you do here, actually."

Is this his way of flirting with you? You're not exactly a blushing maiden, stereotypes about temple stewards aside; you were the youngest when there were people in the temple, their _kouros_ of flesh and blood, with all that the role implied in a temple of Apollo. It's just hard to tell if you're reading him right, when you haven't so much as held someone since the followers and pilgrims had stopped coming to this place, and you yourself had let thoughts of physicality fall to the wayside when the temple emptied out.

Your body reminds you that despite hundreds of years without another body's touch here, your blood still burns hot with the vigor of youth, and it burns hot now as you try to cool yourself and listen to what Jake is saying at the same time. You nod as you crouch lower in the water, and it looks like that wasn't the thing to do, because now he looks concerned.

You come back to yourself in time to realize he's coming closer, and the way you're sitting in the water, you're just about level with his-

"Oh." He's blushing suddenly, and smacking himself on the forehead. His shoulders shake with laughter despite the way he talks himself down. "Well, great going, English, that's a real doozy of a social flub, isn't it? Good golly gosh, I really have become some kind of barbarian without my old gran to box me on the ears every so often; I've gotten so used to equating bathing in the outdoors with nary a soul to mind that I'd not asked if you yourself would be bothered!"

He backs away, and gets to crouching down so you're at least eye-level instead of crotch-level. You have to stop yourself from feeling a bit disappointed, as he whistles instead of speaking more; you would have felt less like you'd made some kind of misstep if he'd kept talking, but at least now you're more focused on how your fingers are turning crinkled in the water instead of how the water slides down his skin. 

You let it go on for a little longer before speaking up, carefully modulating your voice, "I wasn't bothered." 

"Hm?" He stops whistling to look at you, tilting his head slightly. You have to make an effort to look as casual as you (hope) you sound, and try not to focus on the slight, dotty scarring on his cheeks, or the way his teeth peek very slightly out over his lower lip.

"You weren't bothering me, it's fine. I need to feed the chickens. Will you be alright on your own?" You berate yourself for the question; he's a grown man, he'll be fine. You shake loose water from your hair and wade to the edge of the spring, slowly, slower than you really need to; you tell yourself it's so you don't slip and make even more of a fool of yourself.

You reach the bank after what feels like a small eternity, and you're about to climb out when you hear him wading after you. "Actually, if you don't mind, could you stay a while longer? I'm positive you're a busy man, but we could get it all done twice as fast between the two of us, I should say; not to mention that I'm just about done here, just need to have a quick shave and we can hop right to it after."

You turn your head towards him, looking over your shoulder; it strikes you that he's probably getting an eyeful of you now, at least from the ass up, but maybe that's fair after you were leering at him earlier. 

"Alright." You shrug and pull yourself out of the water, sand sticking to your knees before you pour some more water over them to get rid of it, and you turn to face him properly. He's the one staring now, before he catches himself staring, splashing backwards to cover his face. You allow yourself a small, victorious smirk. "You don't have to act like I'm the worst thing you've ever seen. There's nobody else here."

It's weirdly refreshing to say it to someone besides yourself. He still sputters, before breaking out into a kind of nervous laughter. "I suppose you're right, but it's hard to let go of habit, wouldn't you say?" He averts his eyes again until you make your way behind a portion of toppled wall. "It's certainly more than habit to err towards modesty where I'm from, though I really shouldn't make such a to-do about a little nudity between gentlemen in need of a bath, especially in Crete, I suppose; would it be apt to say 'when in Rome?'"

"We aren't in Rome." You sit on the sun-warmed stone as you start drying your hair.

"It's a figure of speech." He huffs, before he picks up his soap and starts rubbing a heavy lather into his hands, and then putting it on his face. "But like I said, never mind that; I'm sure your feathery dames are all in a tizzy about where you must be with their breakfast. Would you mind handing me the mirror? And the razor."

You let it go at that, handing him his things and getting dressed as he shaves. You finish before he does, of course, and then you just sit there while the sun peeks in and out behind clumps and of fluffy clouds that do nothing to stop the heat. You feel the water rising off your skin as you wait, though thankfully, it's long before it can really get too hot.

~!~

Jake somehow doesn't disappear while you're checking on the chickens, or when he takes it upon himself to make breakfast for the day. There are four eggs today, so two of them are going to get cooked the usual way in the offering fire, and the other two he turns into a fluffy vegetable-stuffed roll. 

"I don't have any good bread, I'm afraid, or I'd have made toast to go with it." He says, but you don't think you could finish this with bread. He listens to you sing and pluck at the lyre while he eats, and then pours you a cup and slides a plate over to you as you finish. 

This time you actually made some tea, a pot of _sideritis_ brewed dark and hot enough to be almost sticky. It's good for stripping the oil out of your mouth after every bite of Jake's cooking, though he himself doesn't seem very partial to the taste. You watch him over the rim of your cup, as he tries to swallow it in small, bitter mouthfuls before giving up and putting the cup back on the floor.

"You get used to it." You tell him, and he actually looks _offended_.

"Not over my dead body am I getting used to an attempted tonsil-murder in a beverage like this! And you've been drinking this for how long?" You feel a laugh bubble in the back of your throat, behind the tea, and almost choke. He makes a face as he looks into the greenish liquid in his cup and knocks it back, shuddering. "Remind me to introduce you to good old Earl the next I get the chance! Maybe even over lunch!"

"If you're still around for lunch." You remind him. It stings that you don't know when he'll leave next, more than it should. It looks like the reminder isn't so kind to him, either.

"Would that I could make sure. It's a crying shame that it's always a surprise, and an inconvenience besides. I mean I can't say I'm entirely unsuited to a life of endless adventure, of course; it's what I'd always dreamed of." He sighs, bitterly. "But I suppose dreaming of adventure and seeking it out at every turn can get a _little_ tiring."

"Hm." You finish your food and pour yourself another cup of tea to wash it down. Jake declines a refill, so you pick up the plates. "Help me wash these. We have to go to the garden next."

He smiles, and you feel a weird little flutter behind your ribs. "I have to thank you for letting me bum around the way I do; hopefully I can make it up to you with something I've brought along with me. That old rucksack of mine is bound to have something that'll interest you, right? With all the junk in those pockets and pouches, well, what's mine is yours."

You're not sure if it's the taste of egg and poorly-brewed tea or something else, but your tongue feels sticky and thick in your mouth, so you don't answer. Jake helps you wash the dishes in silence, and then carries one of the larger baskets for you as you head to the garden. You feel a little like you're using him as a pack mule, but it's better than making multiple trips as you find another ripe squash, a bunch of potatoes, more tomatoes, and even the cucumbers are getting pretty big so you take a number of those, too.

Most of this won't even be eaten, just turned into mulch for the rest of the crops. The garden was, after all, meant to feed more people than just you and Jake, at the height of the temple. He hums idly to himself while you pick eggplants and lemongrass, checking the leaves for parasites.

"My gran had a garden like this." He says, after a time. You crack your neck and look over to him, basket practically overflowing now. He looks distant. "More flowers, of course, and about a billion pumpkins. I daresay they were about to eat up the house."

You pluck off a basil leaf that's looking a bit yellowy, crushing it between your fingers. "Do you miss her?"

He's quiet for a time. You think he didn't hear you and then, very softly, he answers. 

"Miss her like I miss nothing else from home." He says, and then shifts the basket a little, his tone changing with it. "I do think we've gathered enough for a feast! Wouldn't you say it's time to head back?"

You don't want to press, and you don't want to overburden him. You nod, and the two of you head back inside. The sun is almost at its zenith anyway, and you've been neglecting your studies the past couple of days. You think of the notes in your desk and remember what Jake had looked like, peering at them the first day you'd met him.

You pause at the archway that leads into the temple again, and Jake nearly stumbles with the basket. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, but I remembered something." You gulp, your mouth still sticky. His eyes are greener than the basil leaves in such bright midday light, almost hard to look at. "Did you want to learn to read Greek?"

He lights up all over, careful of the basket but practically on his toes. "Well, by golly, would I! Were you of a mind to teach me?"

"If you're wiling to learn." The look on his face tells you he's certainly going to try. "It's mostly songs, stories, prayers. Lists. It shouldn't be hard to learn."

"Well, of course! Consider me your newest acolyte, Dirk Strider!" He grins, white teeth glinting as he sweeps past you into the temple. You follow after to make sure he doesn't drop the vegetables, into the blessed shade, and give the words some thought.

Acolyte, he'd said. Apt wording.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit late today, but luckily I was over wordcount yesterday.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the shortest one so far, but also I think it's okay because of what I wrote. :V

You tell yourself not to get used to it.

It's hard not to want more from Jake, but the reminder of his curse and your own, that he can never stay and you can never leave, hangs over every moment you have. You lie in your bed and listen to him breathe on the floor, and every time you close your eyes and start falling asleep, you imagine he's going to blow away like a handful of dust. Every time you wake up and he's still there, it starts over.

You start counting the breaths you hear until you fall asleep.

When you wake up, he's still there. Sunbeams from the cracks in the wall dapple his skin with patches of gold. He opens his eyes with a groan and his unfocused gaze lands on you, sharpening slowly.

"Morning." He says, smiling. "Glad you didn't leave me to wake up on my own."

The day goes by and it feels like he's going to disappear every time he turns a corner, but he never does. By the time you finish your morning chores, you've stopped counting breaths every time you close your eyes. Lunch comes and goes and he shows you Earl Grey, steeped carefully in a pair of cotton pouches. 

He sighs happily over his cup. "Now _this_ is some actual tea. It's not the best there is, but it's at least a little more workable than- what was that you showed me yesterday?"

"Some people call it shepherd's tea." You sip from your own cup and frown, trying again, and again, before you give up and put it down. "I think I still prefer it. This is almost water."

He laughs, bright teeth gleaming. You want to remember that.

~!~

The afternoon draws on for what feels like a year of light, cicadas buzzing in the trees, and Jake frowns over the texts you bring him while you try to guide him through the words. No matter what, he can't seem to say the words without his accent or in any order you tell him to, but he's perfectly understandable besides.

It dawns on you why when he slumps back and sighs, muttering to himself and eyeing you accusingly, though not cruelly. "There is no way on God's green Earth that this actually translates so perfectly to English. I have to applaud you for managing to yank my chain so thoroughly, good sir, but I don't think I quite understand what's so funny about it."

You stare at him, blankly. "You've been speaking Greek to me this entire time." You say. "Nobody who's come to the temple has spoken anything else in hundreds of years."

"What? That's impossible." He sits up again, digging around in his things. You blink as he pushes a piece of parchment paper at you, smoothing out the creases. Looping, copper-green ink swirls across the page, completely unintelligible to you, but Jake looks pleadingly at you as if it might mean something. "Can you read this?"

You look down. The letters- you're sure they have to be letters, but they aren't any letters you're familiar with. You may as well be trying to read hieroglyphs. You shake your head and he scratches his own in confusion, before picking up a pebble and kneeling onto the floor.

You peer down at him, over the scrolls piled around you. "What are you doing?" 

"Can you read this?" He asks, scratching letters- clearer ones, none of the strange, looping lines- into the floor, but the way they're arranged...

"I can't." You're not sure why the fact dismays you as much as it does.

"Huh. Old gran really had thought of nearly everything." He goes quiet, before he looks at the scrolls again and then to you. "Could you read them to me? You mentioned you have to study them. Not that I doubt your memorization skills, as you've well demonstrated with that lyre in hand, I just. Maybe the recitation will help."

He looks at the piece of parchment with the scrawls of green, and maybe just a little of your loneliness is reflected there, in the longing he has on his face for something right there yet so far away.

You pick up one of the scrolls and motion for him to sit somewhere more comfortable. "I'll start with a song." You say. "Maybe you'll remember it if I sing it for you, and you can bring it wherever you go."

~!~

You'd told yourself not to get used to it, but you'd stopped counting the breaths around the third day. 

It was an all too easy routine to fall into, because it wasn't entirely routine in a few ways. You would wake up, before him or with him; then bathe, eat breakfast with your prayers- and he would always try to make something different, no matter how limited the materials, and sometimes the shed would provide something new- and the rest of the day would be decided just about on a whim.

You planned a little. Did you have enough vegetables to eat? Had you checked on the bees? What parts of the temple hadn't he seen yet? You would ask one question, and the day would fall into place from there.

You manage to relax a little. It's nothing like when you were surrounded by other worshipers. Jake seems to consider the worship of Apollo a kind of quaint, backwoods superstition, but you never ask about it for fear of the god's wrath, and Jake never sees fit to actually blaspheme.

It's comfortable enough that you don't quite understand how deep in you're getting until the end of the week, when you fall asleep listening to the sound of him breathe. You lie on your side and watch the rise and fall of his chest, and hesitantly, you reach down and tangle your fingers in his. You close your eyes.

You wake when you hear him singing to himself and packing up his things. You rub the sleep from your eyes as he shoulders his bags and then he realizes you're awake and the panic on his face wakes you up faster.

"Jake?" He'd tucked you in, you notice; you're warm and slow and your blanket is curled snugly around you, and it would be easy to go back to sleep but you push it aside before he comes closer to try and stop you.

"Ah, sorry to interrupt your rest there, boy-o; I hadn't realized I was making such a ruckus!" He murmurs. You realize, this close, he's already bathed, and he's adjusting the straps of his bag, his bedroll already strapped to the middle. "Don't mind me, no reason to leave the sweet embrace of the Sandman's favorite specialty sprinkles just yet!"

"You're leaving." You say. It isn't a question. The words taste like ash. 

Jake's smile falters, his lips twisted in a pained grimace, but he lays his hands on your shoulders and guides you back down to the mattress. 

You put a hand over his wrist and he freezes. "You were going to leave without waking me up."

Silence, and then he looks away from you. 

"That I was, Dirk." He says. "I've spent a long enough time with this curse to know when to get ready for a jump. I'd let myself get careless the first time I'd met you, and I- I'd assumed it would be a less overall nasty experience to have parting words when we don't know if I'll be back."

You grip his wrist a little harder, but you're careful not to make it painfully so. His fingers are shaking, and they don't stop shaking when you lace yours between them; they look larger, stronger, between yours, and they tremble so much you have to close yours around his knuckles.

You breathe out. "How much longer?"

"A few minutes, at best. Halfway through my next sentence at worst." He smiles, ruefully. "I suppose if you're awake, this would be a good time to leave you with a parting gift, and an apology. Anything you would like? I have scrimshaw, bullets, seashells, buttons..." 

He trails off, and coughs, and laughs. "Nothing worth much out here, I suppose, except as a memory."

You look at him, his pockmarked cheeks and crooked smile and the all too easy way he would have left you with nothing if you hadn't caught him, and you know what you want so bad it aches, but you don't ask. You don't ask. You run your fingers over his palm, as if you could draw a map home for him, or to you.

"A seashell would be nice." You say. "I haven't seen the ocean in a long time."

He nods and untangles his hand from your grip, fishing through a smaller bag slung over his hip.

"There you go!" He says, gathering your hands together. The shell he drops in the middle of your outstretched fingers is a murex, faintly pink, with small, rounded spines. He pulls away as you close your fingers around it; it feels so brittle you might crush it with one hand if you'd tried. He chews his bottom lip, looking for all the world like he might be the one about to break down crying.

"I'll look for you, wherever and whenever I end up." He whispers, and he's so close you want to grab hold of him and not let him go. "Crete's a small place, after all; can't be too hard to look for such a temple after familiarizing myself with it, and- and you know what, maybe whatever hocus-pocus you've got laid on your own self will make it so you really will be waiting for me when I find it again."

You look up at him. "Jake?"

He sniffles, and laughs, and bright, gleaming tears run down his cheeks as he does. "And here I am being a child when you're the one who'll have to do the waiting. The nerve of me, right? I promise I don't mean to be such a blubbering pansy in front of you, my friend; just that I haven't had to say a proper goodbye since the night I started this whole mess."

You think of the bright shores of Crete and the shining crescent of Jake's smile. You think of the long nights you'd spent under the stars when you first came here, you think of pilgrims cutting a straight line to the center of the island and coming out into blinding summer sunlight as you had.

You can feel the crackle of magic in the back of your throat, and you mentally recite a prayer to Apollo that you're sure he won't hear. But to Jake, you grip his shoulders and look him in the eye; you imprint the memory of solid flesh under your palms as you speak.

"Look for the temple before Midsummer." He looks up at you, and you don't have time, so you hope he remembers clearly. "You have to start a week early and travel from the Westernmost point of the island Eastwards. Travel on foot and only at night. In the day, recite the song I'd taught you until you feel it scrawled into the inside of your mouth. If you find what you think you can't pass through, try anyway."

He wipes his eyes. "What are you...?"

"You'll find me." You say. Your voice is even but your heart beats against your ribs like a fist at a door. "I promise you'll find me, if you follow that to the letter, please, I can't be-"

You tilt forward into empty air with a yelp and a curse, and you cover your mouth with both hands as if you could catch the curse and draw it back in. 

But it doesn't matter, does it, because you raise your head and you're alone in your room again. The sunlight slants across the floor, and you haven't even bathed yet. You still feel the warmth of him under your palms.

You were so close you could have kissed him. Would he have let you?

Shaking yourself, you stand again, and sit back down on your bed. You'd told yourself not to get used to it, not to get used to Jake's company, and you only have yourself to blame for the cold hollow of your insides now.

You sit there for a little longer until you can bring yourself to head to the spring. You pass by things he'd left behind in a hurry on your way; here, a knife and a chunk of half-whittled wood. There, a dented metal cup half-filled with cold tea. Scrolls he'd tried to pore over with you. A half-finished Pan flute.

He may be hundreds of years beyond you yet, flung to far lands with names you don't know. You bathe in the spring, feed the chickens, wash clothes in the brook. You sweep ash out of the offering bowl and scatter it in the garden for the plants. You pray. You sing. You wait.

You are the steward of this place, the temple of Apollo, and you have all the time in the world.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This one has a flashback/nightmare kind of thing in the wholeass middle of the chapter. It's more eerie than really disturbing, but a live animal does get eaten, so I figured I should warn for that.
> 
> Also I'm a little late again so I guess I'll have to double up.

You started keeping a calendar a few months ago.

You marked the first day as the day immediately after Jake English left you the murex shell, and then you threw yourself into the study of the seasons, the growth of different plants, the positions of the stars and moon at night and then the position of the sun every morning and evening. You read as many of the scrolls left behind as you could, anything involving the passage of time- records of harvests, years of drought. All of it is old, some of it crumbles as you unroll the parchment, some of it is unreadable.

You really should have done a better job preserving these things. You didn't know you would need them. The remainder that doesn't fall apart, you decide to set about rewriting.

You explore rooms that have laid empty and undisturbed for hundreds of years, and the loneliness threatens to swallow you up. Rotting furniture, endless cobwebs, fallen roofing- you'd left these rooms as tombs in your memory when their old stewards died or left, and exhuming them feels like meeting the ghosts of old friends, silent and ephemeral as a reflection.

But you find what you need. You add more tasks to your daily rituals: To clean up old rooms, patch bits of fallen ceiling, sweep out dust and decay. Most importantly, to make new paper and ink.

You remember how to make paper, at least. Ink is a little trickier; you have to experiment with that. You spend more time on it than you'd like to admit, scraping greasy soot off your pots and the outside of the offering bowl, trying to come up with something that will stick. (Sap eventually worked, though it did stink a little until you found the right tree.)

You wind a bit of twine around the murex shell and wear it around your neck, its faint, brittle weight hanging against your breast bone. It's cool at first, but warms gradually as you wear it, until you find yourself forgetting it's there and reaching for it just to make sure while you work on rewriting the scrolls.

There's a lot that you can't use, but a lot that you find that helps, too, and a lot that could be of some value later. You don't recognize some of the illustrations in the borders, but a lot of it you do- monsters, heroes, gods. More notably, you trace your fingers across more familiar letters and breathe aloud names that haven't been spoken since the temple emptied out.

You can't put faces to all of them. It only makes the loneliness worse, and the long, uncertain wait that much more daunting. You grind soot, water, and sap into ink, and you think of the days- months, weeks, even years- before Jake might return. _If_ he might return.

You sigh and read over the scroll in front of you, unroll the new scroll you've carefully pressed out, and start sharpening a reed.

It would be better to forget he existed at all, but you can't bear to. You're not even sure you can. Halfway through a handful of words, your thoughts are already straying to what to do when you meet again; you don't entertain the thought of waiting for nothing. Even you can admit, quietly, in your own head, that you fear what might be at the bottom of that particular abyss.

All the more reason to throw yourself harder into your tasks, to look for things that won't let your mind wander. When it turns out that rewriting the words other people have written doesn't distract you for longer than a few minutes, you pick up something else. It's not like you have a shortage of material to turn into paper. The reeds grow long and thick by the brook.

For the first time in your recent memory, and perhaps the first time you've ever done it, you try to write something of your own. The sun arcs across the sky faster as you get lost in the words, borrowed fragments, thoughts, bits of song that you hum to yourself. You imagine you'll show him how to sing them when he arrives. You imagine you'll tell him all the unsaid things on the page.

You check on the bees and the garden. You darn frayed bits of your clothe with thread found in the back of the shed. You compose more stanzas as you work, counting the beats with your foot bobbing under your knee as you sit cross-legged on the floor.

The sun sets and you have to put the work away, but you don't sleep immediately after dinner as you usually do. You linger in the shadows of the temple's main hall. You sit in the dark and watch the sky turn gold, and then a flash of green, and then gradually dark and violet as wine.

It's only when the moon starts to rise that you pick yourself up and head to your room. You count your footsteps in the dark, nearly tripping over a loose tile. Your hand immediately goes to the murex hanging from your neck, the grooves and bumps on the shell rough under your fingers and slightly warm.

Your room seems bigger when you make your way to your bed, one hand to the wall like a child up too late as you try to find the edge of the cot in the dark. It's only when you sit in it and almost, almost whisper goodnight to the empty dark that you remember that there's nobody to say goodnight to.

You groan and pull your blanket over your head. The night draws on.

~!~

Your name is Dirk Strider and it's your twelfth birthday. 

This doesn't mean much to you at the moment. You're hungry, waiting for dinner, and a little cold, but it's hard not to be at least a little cold in a place like this even with the fire stoked high in the pit. Your brother says not to stoke it too high, or it could burn the hut down, but tonight he's made an exception.

It's been a long day, and the hut smells of fish smoking over the fire. Three strangers from a faraway land- they didn't speak to you, but your brother said they're from the mainland- sit huddled and shivering too close to the pit, and across from them stands your brother himself, tall and flecked with firelight and shadows. All you can see of his face is the grim line of his mouth and the dark cloth over his blind eyes.

Two of the strangers lean against each other, and one of them looks hungrily at the fire while the other keeps their eyes on you. Your brother turns his head to you every so often, and you know he can't see you, but sometimes it feels like he can when he does that, speaking in a constant murmur over the crackle of the fire. 

"Dirk, come here." He says, sharply; enough to wake you up from dreaming of roasted meat, or summer fruit. "I want to ask you something without them listening in."

"You can tell us what you mean to say to the boy." The one facing your brother says. "We defer to your judgement, but we need him."

For what, you have no idea, but you stand up and shake off your half-sleep, padding silently to your brother. He ignores them, but you can tell from the set of his lips that he'd be sneering if he could. You take his hand and his shoulder and guide him to the wall, and he murmurs to you as you guide him to a seat. 

"Tell me honestly." He says. "Do I take good care of you?"

You stare at him, and he presses his lips tight. You don't think you've ever had him ask something like this- to fetch a plant of some kind, to tell him where he's going, to stay home when he goes to the river and make sure nobody comes looking for him while he does it.

(You followed him once, and heard him singing fish into a basket. The fish fled and he realized you were there, and you expected him to be angry, but he taught you how to do it yourself instead. You stood knee-deep in fast, painfully cold water, and listened to a song you can't remember now.)

"Tell me why you're asking, first." You say. He doesn't smile, merely motions for you to come closer so he can whisper it in your ear.

"They want to take you from here, to an island in the South, and then to their temple. They promise to take care of you, but I don't trust them- I hear about the kind of temples and gods they have there, capricious gods that would strike a man down for insolence as bless him for the same damn thing."

He must have heard it, if he's telling you. Your brother makes up stories all the time, but never to scare you. He gestures to the strangers trying so hard, and without any subtlety at all, to hear what he's saying. When you turn to look at them, he lays his worn, heavy hands on your shoulders.

"I trust you, though." He says. "And I trust that if you think they can give you a better life than I can, then nothing will make you resent me faster than keeping you here. You're twelve years old. You're old enough to think about it. You've lived with me for twelve years and I've taught you a little magic already; you should know enough about me and what I do here to know if you want to stay."

You don't feel like it. Your hunger gnaws at your ribs and you think of the fish smoking over the fire, and you want to ask him if this can wait until you're full. The strangers are all looking at you now.

"You take good care of me." You say. His hands don't leave your shoulders, wrists clinking with the yellowing knuckle bones of some old beast and a bleached crow's skull. The fire throws his face into sharp relief, the hollows of his cheekbones and his birdlike nose.

"Do you want to stay, though?" You almost have to read his lips.

You hesitate. His hair is turning silver amid the gold. His neck is thin behind the thick fur in his cloak. He's going to start losing teeth, soon, and blind as he is, his strength soon after that. Your brother, your guardian, you don't want to leave his side. But selfishly, you don't want to stay to watch him turn into an old man.

"No." You say. If the thought pains him, he doesn't show it. He stands tall and straight, and walks back towards the fire, taking a forked stick and raising it to the rafters.

He takes some fish off a hook with it and starts dividing it with a knife, while the three strangers speak to him some more. You catch bits and pieces of what they're saying, about when you'll go, if you have anything to bring. You have nothing to bring, you think, and that's fine, the temple will provide you with everything you might need.

You sit beside him and he passes you some of the fish. The salty flesh almost burns your mouth, but you're hungry and you don't care, practically licking the juices off your fingers when you're done. You even eat the thick, rubbery skin this time, while your brother tosses sharp, needle-like bones into the pit.

You want to ask if you'll come back, just because it seems like something you ask at a time like this, but you know the answer and you know not to waste your words. You look up at your brother wiping a bit of oil off his mouth, and then to the three strangers.

"You'll be leaving tomorrow morning, correct?" He asks them. The one who spoke for all three nods. "What do you have to give me for him?"

You wrap your own cloak tight around your shoulders as they tell him of gold, pearls, frankincense. He turns them all down, sharply, and then when they lose their voices, he speaks.

"My brother isn't a slave. I won't let you buy him like one." He says. "Give me a strand of hair from the three of you, woven into a single cord, and promise over it that no harm will come to him."

The three of them look between themselves, and then to you. There's a kind of hesitation to the way they pluck a single strand from each head, but they weave it together in front of him and place the cord in his outstretched fingers.

"If you mistreat him, I'll know." He says, and he smiles like the touch of freshly fallen snow. When he opens his fingers, the cord is gone, replaced by a small, black lizard that sits tensely in his palm. "No gods of mine or yours would stop me if you break this oath."

Without another word, he pins it against his tongue, and _swallows it._

~!~

You wake up.

Sunlight filters in through cracks in the wall and ceiling. Cold, clammy sweat sticks your hair to your forehead. You feel for the murex shell hanging around your neck and sigh; you don't remember whatever nightmare you must have just had, already fading in the morning light, but that's probably for the best.

You haven't dreamed of much of anything in a long time. The night usually passes uneventfully, a quiet point between dusk and dawn. Maybe you've been working yourself too hard, or more likely, staying up too late.

You yawn and run your fingers through your sticky hair, frowning at it, and ease yourself out of bed. Your throat itches faintly. Are you getting sick? It would be just your luck that you're getting sick, and then you'd have to suffer through the illness on top of everything else you've tasked yourself with doing.

You mark another day off your calendar and note that it's been three months since Jake English has left the temple, and you've rewritten several scrolls, patched a couple of roofs, swept out innumerable piles of garbage, and written a hundred letters you know he couldn't read even if he were here.

You burn them with your morning offering in a separate pile, and you tell yourself maybe the gods will pass on at least part of the message, if it pleases them.

Of course you don't really think they will, but there's nothing much else to do about the letters besides let them take up space, is there? You can't forget him, no matter how hard you try, and writing the letters- even as much of a waste of ink as it might be, it helps. It takes the edge off. You gather the soot from the burning to make more ink later, and another day goes by.


	7. Intermission 1: Letters addressed to Jake English

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disappointingly late, but mostly because I wasn't getting enough sleep.
> 
> This one is like, moderately sad, I think, and I had to do a boatload of old map ogling to make sure things were where they should be for this one. I didn't entirely manage, I think, but hey, it's a NaNo fantasy fic.
> 
> Probably implied to be sadder than it is, because it's an intermission.

_July 21, 1912_   
_My dearest Jake,_

_How have you been on your travels, my dear boy? It's been two years by now, hasn't it, since that fateful night that I had to send you away. I imagine you'd have grown into a fine young man by now, had it been that you could grow any more than you did. I'm old, of course, but you will always be a boy to me when I think about you, though I know full well you were just about my age when I went on my first quest._

_I think about that a lot, really. My rusting joints creak more than ever now, without someone to inspire me to live as adventurously as I could have. Maybe I wouldn't be able to keep up, but I won't be finding that out any time soon. I've lost that vital spark, that hunger for faraway lands and treasures, in losing the one treasure I'd always held so close._

_But I suppose I should be writing about the new things, instead of sticking my head in the old. Life has gone on since you'd left, no matter how much I wish I could stop it all and wait for you to come home._

_I still head the coven, though it's been somewhat reduced in size, and nowadays I really do fear that I'm becoming the old legend I always hated the thought of being. You know the sort, I'm sure; witch of the corner street, high priestess of a tea party, that sort of doddering old thing that can barely see past the edge of her nose anymore while her coven does what it will and falls apart around her ears._

_Evelyn left the coven to start her own, by the way, and I don't mind one bit. I'd known her for thirty five years and she'd been a dear friend of mine, and I know she'd lost so much on that night of her familiar's death, but I can't forgive her for responding with such cruelty to the one bit of family I have left. She deserves a new familiar, yes. But you? You never deserved to be cast into the wild places between the very threads of reality to look for one. That should never have become your duty._

_Perhaps I'm bitter. But I do doubt you're ever going to read this letter, not even if I spent a king's fortune on trying and failing to find you, so perhaps I'm allowed to be bitter. I should have taught you better before that trip to the island, about the kind of magic you could have had despite having no talent for wands and pixiedust. Perhaps then we could have kept a correspondence of some kind._

_How far away into the future or past did she send you, I wonder? What marvels might you have seen, palaces of antiquity or technology beyond anything I could have dreamed? Are you anywhere close to what will be or once was home?_

_Would you have any idea how much I regret sending you away? I certainly think about it enough for both of us, but I'm not sure if I can ever truly grasp the sheer impact of it. Not without breaking to pieces, at the very least, and I don't need to break apart now of all times._

_I hope that, in the event that you can come back home, you choose to. I hope you can forgive me for not defending you against Evelyn that night, as I shouldn't have let the coven take you away from me.  Above all, I hope, despite everything, that you're well._

_All my love, and all I hope for._   
_Your dear grandmother,_   
_Jade Harley-English_

~!~

You put your pen back in its stand and read over your letter, twice, before sighing and sprinkling a little pounce over it to dry. Halley whines at your feet while Bec snores at the foot of your bed. You consider, more than once, burning your letters and just being done with it, but you never can bring yourself to do it, so you just put them away in your bags with a sigh.

You still have all of Jake's things, back at your estate, untouched in his rooms since the last trip. You still find yourself haunted by the photos and memories in that house, the shadows at every corner that even now you mistake for him coming back to greet you as if he'd never left, as if it was all a bad dream. 

You think about all that while you're sitting in a comfortable little hotel room in Paris, and then you stop yourself.

"Honestly, Jade." You mutter, as you carefully ease yourself out of your chair and give Halley a scratch behind the ears. "You went all the way to France to get a little fresh air away from that house and that coven, and it's all you can think about."

Outside, the sky is endlessly blue and there are dozens of cafes lining the street. The smells of breads, coffee, and assorted other flavors float up to your window and you know you should head down and walk the dogs, perhaps get a bite to eat, but it's so, so tempting to just head back to bed. You're old, and you have to admit it to yourself more than anyone. But you're already dressed, and it's more trouble than it's worth changing your mind now.

"Come on, boys." You tell the dogs, your own familiar and Jake's, and Bec opens up his eyes slowly and lifts his drowsy head. Halley sniffs at your hands and licks your fingers, his tail wagging half-heartedly. You pet him, squishing his fluffy cheeks with a smile. "We should head down and get something to eat, and you probably need to relieve yourselves, don't you?"

" _I don't._ " Bec's voice murmurs in the back of your head. " _I was having a nap._ "

"You're also getting on in your years, just like I am, and I'd rather you didn't get fat and lazy with it, so up you go, now." You hook his leash to his collar and he just rolls onto his back, huffing, tongue lolling out. "Don't try that with me, that hasn't worked since you were a puppy. Besides, when we get back, you can resume your nap. The hotel owners won't let me feed you in this room, after all."

It's only the promise of hot, buttery rolls that gets him slowly to his feet. Halley, though, is practically scratching the door when you hook his leash in. As much as he might miss Jake, you think, he never could suppress his own desire for new things.

You straighten your back and put on a sunhat, bright with a cluster of silk flowers and a green ribbon trailing down the back. It's a bit young for you, some people might say, but you've dealt with that sort of talk all your life and besides, you like the way it matches your eyes. You need that kind of small happiness.

It takes a minute to put their little boots on, but you can never be too careful with the likelihood of mud puddles in a hotel, especially after the flood you'd heard about two years ago. 

"I hear the parks are lovely this time of year and I'd like to see for myself. It's a wonder I've not been to one in July yet, isn't it?" Leashes in one hand, parasol in the other, you open the door and lead them down the hall, down the stairs, and out the door. 

Bec walks ahead of you with his head up like a carriage horse, ears turning side to side to listen in on faint bits of conversation around him, while Halley tugs at his own leash once, twice, and then settles into a comfortable pace at your side. It's a mild, pleasant day, and the park is just around the corner. You won't have too much trouble finding a shady place to sit if you ever want to rest your feet after your walk, and there are even stall vendors selling hot peanuts and shaved ices if you care for them.

You almost, almost think of your grandson, hip-height and wide-eyed on his first trip to Paris. You push aside his ghost and straighten your hat, and determinedly buy a hot croissant for Halley and Bec to share, and a cross bun for yourself. The bakery clerk has a look on his face at your dogs, but if he has any comment, he keeps it to himself.

Maybe you ought to range a little further from home, if you're going to stop thinking of places Jake has been.

~!~

_July 20, 1912_   
_My dearest Jake,_

_I'm starting to think it might not be so healthy for me to write these letters. It's only going to feed my loneliness, after all, to have a reminder with physical weight in my cabinets and luggage. I've come to accept that chances are you won't be coming home, that perhaps in some faraway land or distant era, you've found a new home, perhaps, or gotten jaded to your situation, or even died._

_I write to you to assuage my guilt, but until I can see you again, speak to you once more, I suppose I'm never going to get a chance to find absolution. Perhaps even if I spoke to you again and by some miracle you forgave me, I wouldn't find peace then, either._

_Your rooms remain untouched, as I haven't been to the estate since I went on my latest trip to Paris. I left the usual instructions to the maids, the groundskeepers, and the butlers, and I write to them almost as often as I write to you, just to make sure. As of now, I'm making my way to Suez, Egypt by steam ship, where perhaps being somewhere I never took you, I can escape the visions of your ghost._

_Bec and Halley are well, and remain my companions throughout this trip. I couldn't entrust them to anyone else, least of all Halley; while Bec might be able to connect to my thoughts the way he does, I never could replace you to Halley. I doubt you could ever be replaced, after all._

_Do you think, maybe, that when I return, the coven will have disbanded on its own? I'm not sure if I'm likely to return at all, if I'm being honest with myself. I would actually prefer it so, if they took it upon themselves to pull away from the practice of magic. I wouldn't have the responsibility of taking any more of their squabbles into my own consideration. I could focus on something I wouldn't have to keep a secret, perhaps._

_I won't live forever, but a little time and my own old bones willing, I could make good on more of the researching and inventing I'd done before the coven began taking more and more of my time. If I make any new sorts of devices or discoveries, I hope you hear about them, or perhaps they remain in fashion for a long time yet to come, so that wherever you may be, that you know at least part of what I wrote about in these letters._

_I'm only a few hours before it's time to disembark now. I never took you to Egypt, and as much as I regret not doing so while I could have, perhaps this will be a balm to my own, selfish loneliness, to see a place where I will recall a different face, if any faces at all._

_I don't know if I should hope for you at this rate, but if nothing else, I hope wherever you are, you're happy._

_All my love and all I hope for._   
_Your dear grandmother,_   
_Jade Harley-English_

~!~

The moonlight plays off the waves and even from here, you can see the distant, flickering lights of Suez approaching. You'd left the letter in your cabin, your fingers shaking when you'd finished writing it. It never gets any easier to consider that Jake isn't likely to come home, and you feel claustrophobic just sitting in your cabin with the words you'd poured onto the page.

Bec and Halley sit at either side of you while you lean over the railing and feel the salty breeze drying the tears on your lashes. You sniff hard, and Bec nudges your hand, nosing into your palm. You smile down at him and pet over his eyes, and then his ears, feeling him huff softly as you do.

"We'll be at the harbor shortly, boy, no need to worry about me. I'm just feeling a little seasick." You can tell he doesn't believe you, but it really won't be long until you're on dry land, so he lies down to wait it out. You're considering heading back to your cabin to gather your things when Halley suddenly perks up, ears facing straight forward, tail high. You think maybe he's seeing a cat when he starts whining, his tail wagging. You look up.

The face that looks into yours nearly startles you to death.

"Grandma?" He doesn't look any older than the day you'd sent him off. For all you know, it's the same day for him, where it's been two years for you. But the look on his face, he hasn't seen you in much, much longer than that; he stands frozen, and then the tears well in his eyes, and he takes a step forward. Halley breaks free of your grip and runs towards him, while you yourself remain where you are, desperate to believe this is real.

Halley bowls into him, knocking him on his back, and you hurry on your creaky knees to be at his side while Halley licks his face and whines, tail wagging up a storm.

"Jake, my boy, when did you get here?" You murmur, but you're smiling, and the tears are back; you didn't think you'd see him again, let alone so soon. You gather his face in your hands, squishing his cheeks lightly. "You've been eating well, I see; rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, and you've been getting much more sun."

He sniffles, but he laughs, and he reaches up to wrap an arm around you; stronger than you remember, and he'd been a strapping young lad two years ago, so perhaps there's more that's changed than you'd thought.

"By golly have I missed you, gran; and you too, Halley! Who's a good boy? Did you keep gran up without me?" He buries his face in Halley's fur, and you rub his back, and you smile as you hold him and he laughs like all is well.

"You can bring your things to my cabin, dear, I'm sure there's a lot of adventure you've been having without me, in turn." You tell him. You straighten up, even, and you haven't felt so young in years. "I feel like we're going to be spending quite some time telling each other about our respective journeys, and it'll be easier for the porters if we have all our things in the same place."

You know all isn't well just yet. You don't know how long you'll have him with you. But it's been a bitter thing to go where you've gone without him, and you have to admit, you're curious what he's seen. He smiles up at you, wiping his cheeks dry as he does so.

"The things I've seen, too, I'm almost unsure if you'll believe me! _Mammoths_ , gran, I hadn't realized they were so much bigger than elephants, and the _future_!" You're happy to hear him go on, taking Halley's leash, as the two of you make your way to his cabin to get his things. He's brought one bag, like you'd taught him, and the thought of him remembering you wherever he's been brings a smile to your lips.

Your letters, you realize, are too melancholy for an occasion such as this. Besides, the ship docks in another hour, by your estimate, so while he's here in front of you, you can tell him how much you missed him and spoil him with sweets all you want.


	8. Intermission 2: Letters addressed to Jade Harley-English

He's still there the next day, which is a good sign for how long he might have, you think, or at least it makes it easier for you to talk to him. It's strange to see how different he's become, and yet how much the same he still is, in all the little ways you've missed in the past two years. 

"It wasn't easy, but you taught me well about adapting to wherever I was, and- well, you had some tricks up your sleeve, didn't you, to make sure I'd be alright no matter where I ended up?" He gestures towards his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing slightly as he swallows a mouthful of dried dates. You tut as he does so; his manners have suffered a bit without you by the looks of things. "I don't know how you managed to slip in that I'd understand whatever anyone said to me, and they'd understand what I said in turn, but it's turned out to be a great help with everything."

You suppose it makes sense, in part, that you'd notice how the little things have shifted just so, and that they've changed as much as they have. According to him, he'd kept a count of the days as if they'd gone on one after another, and by his perception, it's been at least twelve or so years since he'd last seen you, and Halley, and Bec, and really everyone else he'd known his entire life. You have to admit that even find that you're a little amazed at him, that he's held together as well as he has in that time.

You scratch Halley under the chin and sip your coffee. You can't stop smiling, actually, and the world seems that much brighter this morning, which is a pleasant change from the grey pall that had set in on everything since two years prior.

"Indeed, I hadn't known just where exactly you'd be sent, or for how long, so I'm glad I had the forethought to give you a little something before it was time to go. How long will you have here, by the way?" He nearly chokes on a date as you finish saying it, and you frown. "What's wrong, Jake?"

He has a gulp of coffee and puts the cup down, a little too loudly. His hands are shaking. "Just, well- I'd thought that with Aunt Evelyn leaving the coven, and you said you're not likely to keep the coven together at this rate, either- I'd thought perhaps you could break the spell? That I could stay."

You recognize the guilt that passes over his face when he says it. You're not sure why he should be guilty. Evelyn hadn't treated him fairly; and you remember the letter sitting in your luggage, that he never deserved to be cast out like he was. 

You lay your hand over his, smoothing your thumb over his knuckles. There are little scars on them that hadn't been there before, and his hands are broader, work-roughened. It's been a long time for him, too.

"You listen to me, young man." You say, sternly, but you can't help the fondness that falls into your voice a moment later. "You don't have to feel guilty for wanting to come home. I can't imagine where you've been, or what you've been through, but it's not your responsibility to look for Evelyn's lost familiar out there, and I doubt you ever even could find it in the first place."

He looks up at you. The look in his eyes is pleading, and you grip his hand tighter.

"I can't break the spell." You say, very quietly. "Not by myself."

His free hand grips the tablecloth, and then loosens. You clear your eyes, very carefully, with the corner of a handkerchief. "I can't imagine what it must have been like, exiled beyond everyone and everything you've ever known, but if nothing else, I'm glad to have gotten to see you again, and I want you to know that for everything that's happened to you, I can't apologize enough. A world of apologies and a lifetime of penance wouldn't be enough."

There's silence for a moment, and then another. He turns his head to look around, though you're not sure at what. Maybe he's looking into some distant point only he can see, for how much the time away has changed him. His hand doesn't pull away from yours, though, which you're glad for. 

Your grandson, your last living relative. You think about that, with his hand in yours, that it's a bit of a wonder that it's his ghost haunting you these days.

"Maybe there's something _I_  could do..." He mutters to himself, and then a little more clearly, to you. "I have to believe I can, right? That's the very first step, to believe that I can do it. You've told me before, that magic rides on belief, that you're thinking so hard about it that the world moves a little or a lot with you." 

You smile again, and you hope it comes off as gentle and encouraging. He looks miserable with the thought of all this, which you can definitely understand. You finish your coffee and stand up, Bec's leash wound around your wrist though he hardly needs it these days. 

"I think we could all use some fresh air." You say. "It's always better to think about these things with a bit more open space around us. Helps to air out our thoughts, and we can think better when we have the space to sort it all out."

He doesn't look so sure about that, but he follows you outside with Halley at his heels. Even the way he walks is different now; he has no trouble keeping up with you anymore, and doesn't go even slightly out of breath despite the heat, but it's a little sadder, you note as well, in that he doesn't take in the sights nearly as much. He walks with his head slightly lowered, his brow slightly creased with thought and worry. You remember before, that he'd always be jostling his way through the crowd towards something that had caught his eye.

You adjust your hat and let him take you by the arm, and he seems happy, at least, to give a little support for your aching knees. The two of you don't wander for long; you're too old for that, and it's a hot day like you'd said. 

You make your way back to the hotel, but you take the scenic route, and you're thankful for the breezy balcony when you get up there, despite the stairs being a pain. Jake sits on the bed, pulling off his shoes, while Halley nuzzles up against the side of his leg, and you find yourself just watching him, wondering if he's going to disappear before your very eyes, like a wisp of smoke. 

You can only wonder how much Halley must have missed him, with how close their bond was- is- despite all the distance and time between them, and all the changes Jake's been through. But he still has the same smile, slightly bucktoothed and all too boldfaced. He still laughs mostly the same, if a little more brittle at the edges, a little more haunted by where he's been.

You'd told him of the letters you had with you, and then the ones in various drawers all over Europe by now. You let him read a couple of the more legible ones, even, though he'd been perhaps ashamed to. He read them anyway, while you sat beside him and he leaned against your side in comfortable, if somber, silence.

Will you be writing more letters to him that he won't be reading? You tap your foot against the railing of the balcony, sitting further in the wicker chair and it's plump, silken cushions. Would you be able to bring yourself to?

You'll rest your eyes for a few minutes, you think. You need the rest these days, and the sunlight here slants in a certain way that makes you sleepy. 

You're not sure how long you doze for, but when you wake up, you can't help but feel a deep, engulfing sadness, a bone-deep certainty of something lost. It's with this in mind that a part of you isn't surprised when, as you turn to go back inside the hotel-room proper, Halley is whining and sniffing at the bed, and Jake himself is nowhere to be found. 

You purse your lips and run your fingers over where he'd been seated, and a sheet of paper flutters to the floor, hardly even dried yet. He never was good at keeping his writing clear.

He's used your ink, and your stationary, but it's unmistakably his scratchy, shaky handwriting. The ink is black, and blots under your fingers, and worse still, you feel tears spilling down your face as you read, obscuring more of the page.

So much for going to Egypt to escape his ghost.

~!~

_Dearest grandmother,_

_I'm writing this because I don't want to wake you from your nap. You've been running yourself ragged, by the looks of things, or perhaps things have just been a mess that I haven't been privy to during this little interlude. Whatever the case, I decided to write this also because I didn't want to make this any harder on either of us now that I can feel the spell starting to take hold again, and I might disappear before I even finish writing._

_Be that as it may, I don't plan on idly letting the winds of time spirit me away to wherever without a plan. I have no idea just yet how I'm going to break this curse, but where there's a will, there's a way, right? Especially in regards to such a thing as magic._

_Besides that, I also know someone who just might be as constant in this mess as I am. I wish I could have you two meet; he's a lovely fellow, if a bit on the frosty, mysterious side, but I'm sure if anyone could coax a reaction out of someone like him, it'd be you. But more important than making new friends, he's got some kind of his own Ancient Greek abracadabra going on, and I imagine it might be something he could use to help us, if I manage to find him again._

_That's the hard part, though; he mentioned, last I saw him, that I'd have to look for him a week before Midsummer, and it's quite a bit past Midsummer right now, so I'll have to try again the next time I'm closer to a time like that. Hopefully, wherever I end up next, it is indeed a little closer than not._

_Before I go, some parting remarks; please don't blame yourself for any of this, because it really was my fault for being a tad too trigger-happy back there, and I'm sure you did what you thought was right, or at the very least, what you thought was fair, or what you thought was reasonable. Maybe you think otherwise now, but I can't fault you for trying to hold things together back there, especially in the wake of what happened to Evelyn's familiar so suddenly. I certainly imagine I'd react quite a bit the same if I lost Halley, though, maybe I wouldn't go so far as to throw Evelyn to the whims of a spell like this one._

_I hope you're well, when I see you again, because I definitely will see you again. I hope Halley understands where I've gone, somehow, and that he and Bec can provide you with some much needed companionship and support, because it sounds like the coven hasn't been doing much of that as of late._

_I hope the world opens up for you in every way you could want it to, and I hope that maybe you can create something that I'll see along the way in the future, whether because it's famous or because it's in fashion, though I suppose that's a bit of a joke to the both of us, things being in fashion. Besides all that, I hope I can look back on all this with some measure of happiness, that I may share my adventures that I've had without you, and you can share more yours with me, when it's all over._

_I'll miss you terribly until then, but it'll only spur me forward, won't it? All the same, it's going to take me a while, I know, but I hope that it won't be so much of a while for you._

_With all my love and all I hope for, and until the next time we meet, which God willing should be soon._  
_Your dear grandson,_  
_Jake English._

~!~

It's been another month since Jake's disappeared the second time. You haven't written a single letter to him since that day, but you keep his letter tucked in your purse, to read over when you miss him. The paper is heavily creased for how often you've unfolded it, smoothed it out, and read it over. The ink is yellowing the page, and bleeding through in areas, but you can still read the important parts and guess the rest.

Despite having lost him a second time, you find that the world is renewed to you, now that you know he's well. You recite bits and pieces of the letter in your head, like a mantra to keep you grounded, knowing that he's going to find a way. Knowing that he has the capability to find a way, someday, but someday that you might see.

You find yourself taken in with adventuring again. You range further and further, and look deeper into the cultures you visit, study with them in everything you can find interest in; subjects you'd once never had mind for have a lot more interest to you now, and subjects that you'd stagnated in take on a fresher, brighter cast. You take up your research again, in engineering, in physics, in chemistry and alchemy and magic. You're old, but that is by no means an excuse for you to waste your time with nothing to do.

You return, eventually, to the estate, and formally disband the coven. There's a surprising melancholy to the whole affair, that these old friends of yours share so little with you without the coven's politicking, but you find classes and seminars in other things, in the arts and in the sciences; you read again, and when you can't read, you write, and you listen, and you even find yourself drawn to painting.

Sometimes, you still imagine you see him coming around the corner, a flicker of shadow in the hallway. Once, you imagined you heard his voice. You sat in your favorite chair, reading a favorite novel, and you could swear you heard him calling you from the next room.

You shook your head as the rain poured outside, and you ran your fingers over the softening creases in his letter, where you'd been using it as a bookmark. You'll know when it's really him.

 

END INTERMISSION


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a bit more sexually charged than usual. Mentions of a blowjob, and implied underage temple shit. Kinda slipped my mind that he'd have been so young when he got there, sorry about that.

It's the middle of the night. 

Despite centuries and a handful of months of sleeping at the exact same hour every night, specifically when the sun's faded from the sky just so and the world is only just realizing that it's nightfall, you can't fucking sleep.

You lie on your side and breathe slowly, counting your breaths. You hadn't actually slept all that much the night before, either, or the night before that. 

You haven't had a bout of insomnia this bad since you were a boy. 

Ever since before your brother realized you couldn't sleep despite the brave face you put on in the morning, he'd taught you a couple of easy ways to get to it, and you hadn't had trouble with it since. Now, despite all your best efforts, including your brother's tricks and two pots of insultingly mild lavender tea, and even despite shifting around in your bed for the better part of an hour, you still haven't been able to sleep.

You miss Jake. The room is too quiet with only your breathing keeping you company.

Worse, you miss everyone else. You miss old Fahim's snore, audible even through the walls. You miss the soft noises of rustling cloth as someone adjusted in their sleep, distant whispers, murmuring. You miss all the sounds that made this place alive, even deep into the night, and you hate it.

You miss your brother. You haven't missed your brother in a long time. You knew, deep down, that he should be dead by now. Old bones, even.

It's terrible, to remember these things deep in the night, when there's no respite for any of it because there's nobody to be a respite. While on your own it felt like you were reliving the same months over and over in a faded, foggy dream, keeping track of the months as they pass by _now_ is driving you steadily mad.

Very quietly, you curse the name Jake English, for reminding you what it's like to have company. Well, you don't curse him, but you mutter about him all the same, half-asleep things in a daze that you probably wouldn't tell him to his face. You haven't said much to him in the time you'd known him, now that you think about it. You tired of speaking all too easily, but now you crave it. You talk to yourself. You talk to the chickens. You make up longer and longer prayers just to have something to say.

"I can't believe this." You mutter, turning over again with a sigh. You thump the thin mattress with one hand, and then start counting out a beat with your fingers, reciting a long, old poem to try and get yourself to sleep or at least to while away the time with _something_ to fill the empty air.

You hear a clatter from the direction of the kitchen.

You frown.

Not an animal, you hope. It wouldn't be the first time some wild thing has come to seek refuge from the night here in the temple. You grope around your bedside for the flint and steel and then the oil lamp- and then a hand closes firmly around your wrist.

Your immediate reaction is to strike out with the other hand, hard. Your hand makes contact with a loud, meaty _thwap,_ and whoever grabbed you lets go with a cry of pain.

"Fuck!"

You blink.

Not whoever. Someone familiar, in fact.

"Jake?"

"That's a Hell of a greeting for someone who hasn't seen you in a hot minute, don't you think?" He hisses in pain, and in the dips of grey in the shadows, you make out his shape. "Oof, _right_ in the sniffer, too; I think I might be bleeding."

"You snuck up on me." You say, and he whines. You strike the flint until the wick lights, and hold the lamp up to see him. He actually is bleeding from the nose a little, so you slide your way out of bed and towards one of your various shelves. "Were you the one who knocked something over in the kitchen?"

"Yes, well, sort of. I'm not sure if I knocked anything of yours over or if I just dropped something of mine in there, but it's definitely dark and hard to see. I never really appreciate the marvel of electrical lighting quite so much as when I have to do without!"

He sighs and flops onto your bed, and you look him over in the dim light and think despite all the questions you want to ask him, he should probably take the rest. You yourself likely won't be getting any, not with your questions running laps around your head now. You chew on the inside of your cheek as you take a bundle of yarrow from the shelf, crushing a sprig in your fingers and then turning to Jake.

"Tilt your head up." You tell him, and when he does, you stick the crushed yarrow in his nostril, to a considerable amount of squawking. You frown. "Don't be a child. It stops the bleeding."

"Well, thank you but you could warn a fellow before sticking a finger so literally in his face, you know!" He sniffles a little, and then has to hold the yarrow in his nose with one hand as he sneezes and shudders. You have to stop yourself from laughing or smiling at his misfortune, especially since it was technically your fault. When he looks up, he gets that look on his face that tells you he just realized you're completely nude.

Then you allow yourself to smile, tightly, just a little, as he bashfully looks away.

"You've seen me naked multiple times, and it's a hot night. Don't act like this is new to you." You tell him, getting a rag for his face. He still has blood under his nose, and you don't want it staining your sheets. You can practically feel his eyes on you as you move, and you're not sure how you feel about it as you try not to move too tensely, or too quickly, when you get back to him and hand him the cloth.

He seems thankful enough to wipe his face, and then he folds the cloth between his fingers and just sits there. You notice he'd put his massive rucksack down in the corner of the room, or perhaps dragged it there, which maybe explains how he managed to come in so quietly. He coughs into his hand. 

"... Thank you, by the way." He says, and then grins. "And I'm sorry that I ended up here so late in the evening, but you were the one who instructed me to come under cover of night, and I suppose I may have hurried my way a little once I realized I was nearly there. You don't mind too terribly, do you?"

"I don't, and I wouldn't, because you're actually right on time." He looks puzzled by that, so you continue speaking while you look around for your sandals and, upon finding them, start lacing them up your legs. "You passed through a tunnel before you got here, yes?"

"Well, yes, but I'm not sure what you're getting at from there." He's already pulling off his boots, but you stop him with a hand on his ankle. He has no choice but to look right in your face as you speak.

"From there, had we been following the usual protocols, you would be ritually purified for the rest of the night, and then at dawn, you would bathe before the statue of Apollo, accompanied by a lot of burned offerings and a lot of singing, maybe, depending on what position the stars are in. As the sun rose higher, there would be an oath to confirm you as an initiate of the temple."

He stares. You stare back, unflinching. When it gets to be so tense you can tell he can't stand it, then you press on, completely straight-faced. "When time came for my own initiation, I was fortunate enough to have the stars align in such a way that they had one of the other temple stewards suck my cock."

It knocks the wind out of Jake in a drawn out, sudden wheeze, sudden and hard enough to launch the clump of blood and yarrow from his nose. You just barely miss it, while he sputters, flushed in the face, and sitting rigidly straight. He checks his nose to see if the yarrow really has stopped the bleeding, and then turns to face you, mouth agape.

He moves to say something, closes his mouth, shakes his head, and tries again, this time looking a little more like he's in on the joke, but still flustered. "I think that's a bit of an unnecessary detail to share, perhaps unless you were meaning to initiate me into the mysteries of your temple! And I very much doubt that someone actually went and- well, sucked- I mean, put their mouth around your-"

"You can say it, you know." You stand up again, and he watches you, and the hunger you'd held down so long rises up again. You push it down, as you get dressed. "You don't have to worry about it happening to you."

Not if he doesn't want it to, you think to yourself. He sputters again, and looks away, as if to look for anything in the room might interest him more than the thought of someone's lips around him right now. 

Maybe you'd been too forward. It's hard to tell.

You finish getting your sandals on and carry the lamp with you towards the door.

"Where are you going?" He asks, though he doesn't get up to stop you. You turn your head to look at him, raising an eyebrow, and he flushes again. "I didn't mean- well, I'd just gotten here, and it's your room, I hope I wasn't disturbing your rest or anything, I just- I don't think I should be the one to take up your bed, right?"

"Afraid of the dark?" You ask. Before he can answer, you blow out the lamp, and with a gentle clink, you put it down. It's actually easier to get to the kitchen this way, but that's not where you're headed. 

He shakes his head. "Is there something in the air here, this time of year? You're acting rightly weird, if I may speak so plainly. I daresay I don't recall my last visit being quite so..." 

He makes a vague gesture with his hand that you can't even guess at. You shrug.

"Also, you're still naked." He laughs, nervously, before straightening up. "I'd feel like an absolute boor if you caught a chill while I'm sitting here all snugly, you know, so how about you come back here and I put to right whatever might have been dropped in the kitchen?"

He can't see your face, probably, so you let yourself smile a little wider, though your blood thrums all the way to the tips of your fingers and your heart flutters as he brushes past you. You rub your hands to warm them against the night air, though it's warm enough that you don't really need to, and yet your skin still breaks out in gooseflesh when you run your hands over your arms. You shake your head.

Jake comes back after a couple of minutes while you try to get your sheets slightly cooler than they were while you were lying in them, and you're still wide awake. Wider awake, even, so you sigh and flop back on the mattress to look at him, resigned to hopelessly waiting for dawn. He shakes himself in the doorway as he regards you, and then plops himself on the floor while dragging his rucksack in behind him, undoing the straps that hold his bedroll to the bag's middle. 

You watch as he busies himself getting it ready, and then as he hesitates to get dressed while you're sitting there. He shakes his head and starts undoing his shirt.

"Honestly, it's not been so long that I should be entirely unfamiliar with you, right?" He says, chuckling to himself. The last of his buttons come undone and he shrugs the shirt off his broad shoulders, folding it haphazardly before stuffing it in some godforsaken pouch corner. "I've seen you nude, you've seen me nude, I'm pretty sure I've scrubbed your back and you've scrubbed mine. What's a little completely platonic nudity among men, right?

"Right." You answer, lying on your side. Your eyes trace over his shoulders, down his arms, down his chest. You focus on his navel so you don't go any lower, at least until it's hidden when he turns around to pull his pants off. He looks over his shoulder at you. His mouth does that thing where he opens and closes it in quick succession, debating with himself whether or not to say what he wants to.

Whatever it was he was going to say, it's gone when he pulls one of those loose, almost tunic-like sleeping shirts over his head. He sighs and flops back on his bedroll, staring at the ceiling while he twiddles his thumbs.

"You were joking about your initiation, right?" He asks. "Just wondering and all. Nothing big to make of it. I don't have any interest in joining any new or old religions, to be honest, but that sounds like a much more intense way of getting into something like that than, say, my first Holy Mass."

"I have no idea what that is." You watch him, and you're not even hiding the fact that you're watching him, your head pillowed on the curve of your arm. "But I wasn't joking about my initiation. I was the temple _kouros_ when the temple had that sort of thing. Apollo made into youthful flesh. I would have been the _kouros_ until I was old enough to go looking for the next one, but then..."

"Huh?" Now he turns his head, half-asleep but intrigued. "Then what? I can't really infer what you're talking about, you know. Chorus this and Apple-o that. Let's say you're explaining this to someone who's never heard of these things, because, well, you are."

You purse your lips. You don't glare, but you imagine your expression isn't doing you many favors, because he looks sheepish. A minute passes, but when he doesn't turn away to leave it alone, you sigh through your teeth. 

"Do you really want to hear the story of how I came to the temple?" You say, softly. "Why I don't age into dust like everything and everyone else here?"

You wonder if he can tell how long it's been. You wonder if it's been anything close to that long for him, since he'd been flung into the swirling eddies of time itself. He looks the same sort of lonely that you feel, sometimes, and the way he looks at you now, without saying a word, he looks like he's waiting to hear an answer from someone else. 

But you don't want to answer for him, on something like this. You press on. "Well?"

Another breath passes, and then another, in silence. 

You're about to turn around when you hear him murmur something so quiet you almost miss it. "Hm?"

"I said if you don't mind, well. Yes. It's quite the mystery, isn't it?" He looks away from you, at a crack in the wall, and then back to you, though his eyes focus on the murex you still wear around your neck before he looks up into your eyes. "Something happened to you, right?"

You glance away, and hook the pad of your thumb into the little opening of the shell, just to have something to fiddle with while you speak. "It is." You say, turning the shell around and around in your grip. "And yes, something did. It was a long time ago, so long that parts of the story are just a story by now, because I'm so unsure of how long it's been exactly, and how it went. But..."

You go quiet, and then you begin. "It goes something like this..."


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stuff about death in this chapter, and disease, and more curses.
> 
> Also this chapter is dedicated to AO3 user PaopuConMostaza, for being such a cool person as to determinedly read my ridiculous updates through google translate. You're awesome!

"Five years passing after I'd been introduced to the temple went on with no great incident, and in fact, with a strange _kouros_ who already knew a little magic, that our oracle had proclaimed _had_ to come from my specific patch of nowhere- and this is all the way up in where I'd later learned the Southerners called Thrace- the temple flourished. Crete and Thrace are about as far apart in the empire as it gets, after all, so it was a hard thing to even get me here."

"We had pilgrims coming from all over the island and even ranging pretty far beyond, from the islands of Delos, to Patara, to Corinth, to fucking _Delphi_. It was a big, popular time, even when we weren't getting new initiates. Popular enough that things started getting messy, and priests started getting proud."

Jake, for his part, is a surprisingly rapt listener, even when he should be falling asleep. He's not exactly wide-eyed, but he has that look on his face that some of the pilgrims had when hearing about where you'd come from. You don't want to go into detail about home, though. Your memories are too foggy, flickers of monsters by firelight.

"You can guess where this goes, I'm sure." You purse your lips, choosing your words. "If you know anything about the gods around here, that is, without naming names. But in case you don't, I'll spell it out for you, in as much detail as I can so you don't wander off too far without bringing anything down on our heads."

"Mortals- even priests, if they get to a point- have this really bad habit of letting their egos get inflated, and carrying them off to say things that they shouldn't and maybe don't even really mean. That's how it went here, if you still want to hear it."

You're not sure if you're trying to drum up tension or if you just don't want to say it, but you count the number of breaths between your last word and whatever you might say next. Four in total, slow and even through your nose. You look up at Jake and find him still looking at you, but he turns his face away when you meet his gaze.

"It's the thing with that... hubris, is the word; you've heard of it? To challenge the gods? That happened. Maybe not intentionally, but someone proclaimed, very loudly might I add, that we should be taking over the island with our riches, and that we had the blessing of the gods just because we'd been getting this really long _lucky streak_ ever since I'd shown up."

You scoff, and very quietly, you hear Jake do the same, if a little less confidently. You continue. "It wasn't luck. And it wasn't a blessing, or at least, not the kind of blessing they were looking for. But it was said, hundreds of years ago, that it was when people started getting sick, and the tunnels started caving in, and the pilgrims started coming less and less. I suppose you don't say the gods are on your side so loudly, or else they might retract their help, or worse."

"They didn't believe it was a curse until I got sick. There was a lot of blame being thrown around, and a lot of fear that I didn't understand, because even though I was meant to be a fleshy vessel for the divine down here, they honestly didn't tell me much. All the rest, with the gardening and the chickens, I started doing that when they started getting short on hands."

"Some of them died, but I heard a few made it out only to die much, much later of maybe less gruesome causes, and some of them never came back. Soon we were just the bare bones of the place. There were five of us left, in the end; three old men, one of the younger stewards, and myself. The fever felt like it would tear itself out of me. I don't know how it must have felt for a man with swollen joints and missing teeth."

"We prayed for a sign, or something to balm our pain, but the gods were silent and soon, there were four of us. The younger of the old men, Fahim, passed retching blood. We expected his doom to be ours soon enough."

You check to see if Jake is still awake. He looks like he's thinking about it, and the story's already grim enough without him overthinking the details. "Shall I go on?" You ask.

"Well..." He squares himself, which is a bit funny to look at when he's lying down. "Alright, go on. You've gotten this far and I haven't heard a sniff about how you got to be the immortal steward of an ancient temple."

You think of what happened next, which is actually a lot harder to do than you expect. You sigh.

"This is where my memory gets fuzzy, because I started getting delirious with the fever. I think they must have prayed over me, or perhaps I did the praying, begging for a god of healing from both my homeland and here to help me. I don't know who answered, or if I'm thinking someone answered, but I woke up and the fever broke three days later."

"Wait, wait, hold up." Jake actually sits up and turns, looking at you full on. "You don't even remember how all this happened? Or am I missing something here? How did you get better?"

"I'm getting to that." You frown until he settles back on his bedroll. You do feel kind of like you shouldn't be so hard on him, but you've spent a long time without being interrupted and you don't have a taste for it now. "Anyway, the fever broke three days later, but I was still delirious and we weren't sure if I was going to die despite the extra heat fading off of me. Pretty soon the remaining old man, Kimon, died too, and the last steward, in good health, fled for his life."

Jake blinks, purses his lips, and lets out a low hum. "Oh."

"I prayed a lot while coming out of that fever, in the last of it, and I don't remember entirely everything I saw. But I think I heard a familiar voice, and the sound of crows, though I've never seen a crow here in the entirety of the time I've stayed."

You're lying, though. You remember, distinctly, a single crow with a beady red eye, regarding you from the window as you lay sweating and dying, but it spoke with your brother's voice and you could swear you were dreaming. The crow hopped into your window, onto your chest with the weight of a nightmare, but it murmured against your cheek and plucked something from your mouth, before it flew away. 

"One of those nights, there came a nightmare." You say instead. "But when it ended, all of a sudden, I could breathe again, and I could open my eyes and look around, and take in the desolation around me."

You cast your eyes down as you speak, now, hardly even noticing Jake's presence as you recall. "It was terrible, at first. I was alone, lost in a faraway land, with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to. I considered, for a time, leaving this cursed place. But every time I considered it, I could feel a hold in me that I couldn't explain, and I knew I would have to stay."

"I tried, of course, but it was as if every one of the open places where I could leave the valley were closed to me. I know where I went the first time, theoretically, and I knew where the pilgrims came through. But if I looked for them, I couldn't find them."

"So now here we are." You look up at Jake again, who for once, holds your gaze steadily, though he's twisting his fingers in his shirt. "I can't leave. This place won't let me leave. But I won't die, either, and I don't know why it's like that. I've wanted to go home for the longest time, Jake. I think you must know something about what that feeling is like, after what you've told me."

He glances away now, and you turn over. The sky is still dark, and the frogs and crickets still sing outside. You don't know how long until dawn just yet, but you know you won't be able to sleep even if you try. You sigh and turn over, facing the wall, and even though you've managed to say so much, you feel like you've said nothing at all. The ache of loneliness threatens to devour you from the inside out.

You hear shifting beside you, and feel a faint dip on the side of the bed as Jake sits on the edge. 

"This could be a mite awkward, but I suppose you're right, we really are displaced from where we really want to be, both of us. I can empathize, certainly, in that respect." He says, and you can imagine he's twiddling his thumbs. You look over your shoulder at him, seeing him from the side, and he's not looking at you but at his hands, which are surprisingly still. 

His face is somber as he speaks. "I can't imagine how much worse it would have been for you, of course, all alone and for much longer than I've been out and about. And to be honest, I didn't come to find you just for the company, but now I feel like a bastard for coming here with the thought that- that, I don't know, that you might have set yourself up like some Circe of Aeaea here, and you preferred the solitude, perhaps, but you could help me break my own curse."

You huff through your nose, very quietly. "You can lie down if you like." You tell him, and your heart is doing that awful flutter in your chest again at the thought, but you know he's probably not going to take you up on the offer. To your surprise, you hear him sigh and flop down behind you, his back to yours.

He's quiet enough that you think, again, that maybe he's asleep, before he speaks up. "Do you think there's any way we could fix both our problems?"

"I don't know." You say. You breathe. "I don't think I've ever really tried."

He clicks his tongue. "Hmm."

There's a pause, but a short one, before he turns his head just enough that you're practically cheek-to-cheek and you can see the outline of his eyelashes. He smiles. "Well, if you've never really tried, then I'm sure now is as good a time as any, while I'm here! Practitioner of the magical arts, remember?"

You laugh, softly, more a breath than anything else. "Yeah." You say. "I remember."

You lay like that, back to back, facing the other way from each other. You don't fall asleep, but you fall into a kind of daze, counting his breaths and yours, and the short moments of unevenness between them where you don't quite match up to each other. You listen and hear him start to snore, and eventually, that's all you hear as the crickets and frogs stop singing.

The rooster crows, and you feel the first fingers of sunlight crawl across your neck from the crack in the wall. Sighing, you ease yourself out of bed and look down at him, lying beside you, fast asleep.

Should you wake him? It was late when you and he spoke, and late when he arrived. You don't know exactly how late, or exactly how long he'd been traveling. It would be cruel, you decide, and besides, you're not sure if you have anything to say to him, right just now. Not after pouring out everything you'd said under the cover of night.

Somehow, despite not getting a wink of sleep, you feel ready to take on the day's tasks. Maybe it's the company, despite the ache beneath your ribs. You take your bathing things to the spring and think about it there, while Jake sleeps, and you wonder if he's made it so that he can stay longer than he had before. It would be too much to see him again, speak to him again, and have him leave immediately after.

But then, he's arrived at your door three times now, hasn't he? There has to be something precious in that, something that draws him to this place. You push yourself under the water and look up at the ripples of broken sky over your head, bubbles rising sluggishly from your mouth. 

You don't know what that means, and in a way, you're not sure if it means anything at all. You come up for air as a hot breeze passes and it still manages to chill your skin while you scrub yourself down. Your toes squish in the mud, and you try to ground yourself with that.

You still have the murex around your neck. Should you still be wearing it? Would that be too much? And  you have more to ask him now than ever, about how he found his way without being guided- and if he could lead you out. If you would even be allowed out, from the hold this place has on you. Where would you even go?

You scrub soap into your hair and dive under the water again, and finish off all the suds and dirt before you come up. The water sloshes around your hips, cold contrast to the already scorching sun this time of year. As you dry off, you think of what he said, about coming back to ask you to help him break his curse.

Maybe he really came back for you. Maybe he will leave you here, in your temple and tomb, once he's done. But maybe, maybe, he'll keep to his side of what he said and find a way out for you.

You run through the possibilities of that. When he still hasn't woken up, you check on him to make sure he's still there, and then you set about feeding the chickens, offering breakfast, leaving a portion of food for him on the bedside for when he wakes up. You think too hard about it all and lean against a wall, a hand over your eyes to shield you from the sun as you think it all over and hate yourself for wanting to so bad. Hate yourself for thinking maybe it's too good to be true, and maybe all you're doing is making it worse for yourself in the long run.

Maybe.

Maybe.

You're really starting to hate that word.

Better to spite it and leave it out of your thoughts. You go through the garden and think, you will make something of this. You don't know what. But something.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly late again because this one ended up being 3k words long. Oops.
> 
> I really hope this fic actually involves some obvious DirkJake content soon because I'm really not used to going this many words without some fucc happening.

Hours later, Jake finally wakes up and finds you checking on a newly-hatched chick. It's still wet with egg-fluids, but it's chirping and looks otherwise healthy. He smiles, stretches to get the stiffness out of his shoulders, and approaches.

"I don't know much about animal husbandry, but she's quite the beauty!" He says, while you gently tuck the chick against its mother, who glares balefully at Jake and makes a low, crooning noise to her chick. He chuckles and backs up a little. "Or I assume that's a she, right?"

"No way to tell at this age." You tell him, and stand up, wiping your hands off on your hips. "Did you sleep well?"

He shrugs. "Certainly better than I would have on my bedroll, though I'm quite a bit stickier than I'd usually be considering the weather. I can see why you sleep nude in the summer."

"Hm." You tug at the edges of your tunic where it's sticking to you with sweat, and then gesture towards the edge of the chicken pen where there's an old, stone bench for you to sit on in the shade. "I take it you want to talk, and not about the weather."

He blinks, and then brightens up. "Oh! Yes, actually, I was recalling the story you told me last night, and I wanted to talk more about that. Er, if that's alright with you."

It's hard to talk about after keeping it down so long, but you _need_ to talk to him _sometime_ , right? You sit down first, scuffing your toes in the dirt. "You can ask about it, and I'll tell you anything I remember." You say, and he sighs in audible relief as he takes the seat beside you. The sunlight falls through the leaves, leaving patches of greenish light on his face and shoulders.

He claps his hands together and places them in his lap. "So." He says. "I'm getting the feeling I'm missing out on some details here, because normally people don't just become immortal after surviving a weird plague. I mean, I can understand a heartier constitution afterwards- though by the extremity of what you'd described, that's a bit odd, too- so what aren't you actually telling me?"

At least he doesn't wait on asking the most glaring question there. Before you can tell him that you don't want to answer that, he nudges you in the shoulder with his own, the touch so casual and and entirely at ease that it shuts you up. 

He smiles. "I'm prepared for the possibility that you just plain old don't remember, of course, but it seems a rather bit important for that, at least for as meticulous a fellow as you."

"Uh." Damn. He's got you there, and you're distracted by the gleam of green and gold in his eyes, the curve of his lip, the jut of his cheekbones. The cold loneliness coalesces in your gut into a heavy pit, and this is probably your best chance to get rid of it, just talking to him honestly. The flutter of something warm and excitable in your chest, urging you to tell him more about everything just to have him listening to you, probably doesn't hurt either.

He looks expectantly at you all the while, because of course he does. You don't really know where to begin, but you breathe out, slowly, and try to recall a good point before you were sure you couldn't die.

~!~

You're seventeen or eighteen by now, last you checked. Your birthday must have passed sometime ago, after you'd gotten sick, because it feels like you've been sick for weeks. It could have been months or years and you wouldn't know, drifting in and out of consciousness. When you _are_ conscious, you're in pain, and you quickly start wishing for the fever daze or sleep to settle in once more.

Sometimes you hear murmurs. Rumors or worried whispering. Praying. Especially praying, to the Apollo Acestor, for a sign that this was to pass.

Not that anyone would have been able to interpret the signs, probably, with how the oracle had died some time ago before you'd fallen ill yourself.

You were moved from your old room to one with a window, so that the air could circulate a little better and maybe you wouldn't be breathing nothing but the spirit of the illness. Poultices were rubbed on your arms and feet, and every so often you'd be roused from sleep to down- or try to, you threw up most of them- various teas and elixirs.

At some point, you start to pray for your death. You don't really want to die, but it's at this point that you don't want to suffer more.

You at least hope it will come while you sleep, and without waking you with a gout of blood exploding out of your mouth and nose. You turn your head to face the window and squint at the sunset-stained sky, thinking to yourself that firstly, it's beautiful this evening, and secondly, if you turn your head it'll make more of a mess if you do lose all your blood from your face but at least you'd die faster and in slightly less pain.

You close your eyes, thinking to yourself it'll only be a moment and you need the respite from the aches and the dizziness anyway. Your stomach roils with the latest of an attempt at a meal, some mostly-bland porridge and shepherd's tea made too light, and you groan as you try to keep it down.

"You look fucking miserable." Would you look at that, you're so out of it you're hallucinating your brother's voice. You feel something hopping on your bed, far too heavy for a frog but far too light to be someone sitting beside you. "I told them to take better care of you. This is a disgrace."

You hum your agreement, but you just want to sleep. The hopping won't let you though, stopping every few moments and starting up again as whatever it is moves to a new spot on your bed, and you hear a low crooning as it does. You finally crack an eye open, the low, purplish light turning the room gloomy and strange, and sitting on your arm is a crow, feathers so black it's like a hole in the world. 

One beady, red eye regards you from the side of its pointed head, and then it opens its beak and speaks. 

"Before you ask, yes, it's me." It says, hopping closer towards your face. "It's been a long time, Dirk."

It sounds exactly like your brother. You blink with your mouth hanging open at it, and it laughs like an omen, harsh and grating.

"I'm dreaming." You say.

"You're not." It answers. "I've taught you better than to believe that crows can't speak unless they're in your own head."

You frown. "And I'm sure someone in a dream wouldn't say that exact thing, would they?" But the crow- your brother, _in_ the crow?- hops closer to your face. It tilts its- his, this is _ridiculous_ \- he tilts his head and looks your face over, and you can almost see yourself reflected in its eyes. 

You imagine you probably look just as bad as you feel. You can't see yourself in his eyes, not really, but you know; your hair a mess and your lips cracked and bloody, your eyes red with veins and the skin around them dark with lack of sleep, swollen as a bruise. You tilt your head back on the pillow but he follows, and hops onto your chest.

Your crow-brother sighs and hops off your chest. 

"Poison, and effective poison at that." He mutters. You frown again, though it hurts your mouth to do so, as he continues. "Something in the water, and you can't very well go on without water. It's going to take forever to find what I need around here on this godforsaken island."

The thought of water reminds you of how you're having such a hard time keeping anything down. Your throat protests- and really, the rest of you does too- as you sit up in your bed to look at him properly. "Need for what?"

"A cure, of course." He does a little hop to look at you again, this time perched on your knee. "Stay down and refuse to drink any more. If you can help it, try not to eat, either. It's not particularly sensible, is it, but it'll slow it down."

Another hop, a flutter of dark wings. He looks into your eyes again, though from his perch in the window this time. Somehow he looks about ready to say something, but then he shakes himself as if to shake it off, and flies away. You pass out shortly after that, and when you wake up, there's no sign he was ever there, or that what you saw was even real. The stars sparkle outside and a chill wind curls across your fevered face through the window.

The last remaining healthy steward of the temple comes into your room with a pot of tea and an herb-soaked rag over his face. You consider telling him about the crow, but you stop yourself; you realize you must have dreamed it, nothing more.

He pours you a cup of the tea and helps you sit up, careful not to lay his hands on you more than he needs to, for fear of the fever passing through your skin. As you drink, you resent that a little, because it wasn't so long ago that you'd found something like a lover in him, amid all the pilgrims who wanted you only for a blessing and old men who wanted nothing of your body or heart at all. Now he looks at you with a kind of repulsion, and you cast your eyes down and think of dreams.

~!~

Morning comes, eventually, and you don't know which morning but only that you ache even worse than you did the night before. It's going to be a warm day, maybe even unseasonably warm, but you sweat and shiver with chills.

The crow is back, with a pouch of some kind of dried herb grasped in its beak. You don't think crows can make pouches out of cloth, or, any kind of pouches actually, so you stare. He flies a single loop around the room and drops it on your chest, then lightly nibbles at your fingers.

"Are you going to talk again?" You ask. Your voice sounds worse, too, rough as salt. The crow looks up and caws like a normal crow, so you shrug and force yourself to sit up and untie the pouch to get a proper look at the herbs.

It's rough and greenish-brown, a mixture of some kind, but you recognize it. The fact that you recognize it makes you wince, because you know what you have to do with it, and also ache, because you know who it must have come from. You look at the crow again, blinking slowly at it as you get your trembling limbs back under control just enough to push yourself out of the bed.

At the door, you lean against the frame and look at the crow again. "Did you fly all the way from Thrace just to get this?" You ask. The crow stares at you.

"Don't be stupid." It says, once more with your brother's voice. "Go mix that with some honey and eat it, and don't have anything else until I come back."

Before you can question that, it flies away. You're left alone with a pouch of bitter herbs that honey only makes taste worse, but you remember how it soothed your fevers as a child, and you're thankful that even as strange as this is, your brother is looking out for you.

~!~

"How does this come to you being immortal? It sounds like he just gave you medicine." Jake says, in the present, pulling you from the already painful, hazy recitation of your memories. He looks sheepish, and as if it's helpful, he adds. "Crows can be trained to talk."

You glare at him.

"I'm beginning to get the impression that nothing I say will come out as believable to you, when I say that I know that was my brother's voice, and that crow knew what I was saying more than your average bird." You tell him, and he shuts up. You look back into the middle distance and try to recall, quietly, but the thread takes far longer to pick up again than you'd like. It's hard enough to believe all this without running commentary.

~!~

You learn throughout the week that the last steward of the temple is you. Old Kimon died while you were unconscious and the only other person here fled.

There's not much you can do about how slowly you realize it. You're still not getting better, no matter how much of that herb mixture the crow- your brother- brings you. It's around this time that you're deeply thankful for that bird always coming back, even if it's to admonish you for some slight you didn't even realize was a slight, because now there's nobody else to talk to.

Not that you do much talking. Mostly you lie there, getting worse and worse. The herbs only help so much, and it's not long before you're at the point you were considering death again.

You're so delirious that you don't even notice when he shows up at first, not as a crow, but as a man. You feel a cool hand on your brow and hear him murmur something over you, and when you open your eyes, the first thing you see is the crow perched on his shoulder, and then the shock of silvery hair, the creases of his face. His blind eyes are still bound behind the blindfold, but the way the crow looks at you, you know he can see you.

"You look terrible." He says. He cups your face, and his fingers feel like ice on your burning flesh. He turns your face this way and that and frowns. "What happened to you? What did they do to you?"

You can't even speak. You stare, dumbly, not realizing what you're seeing but for the ache that centers in your chest like a nightmare. It might be a nightmare; he looks aged by a lot further than five years, his cheeks gaunt and his skin blotchy-pale. He'd always been pale, but he looks like a ghost now. 

You're not sure he isn't a ghost. Is this death at last, come for you in the shape of your brother?

He leaves the room but the crow stays at your side. That night, the fever burns worse than it ever had when you were actually sick. You imagine faces in the shadows, and you puke up a clot of dark blood, and it hurts so bad that you cry like a child as it tears its way out of your throat. Sometime in this agony, you end up on the floor, lying on your back and certain this is the end.

The crow hops onto your chest, and in your brother's voice, speaks one more time.

"I'm sorry." He says. "This probably doesn't feel great. I can only think of one last thing to do for you, and you're not going to like it."

You feel your mouth open to speak, but then the crow dips its head past your lips and takes hold of something in your mouth that you didn't even know was in there. It tugs it out and flies out the window before you can see what it is, but slowly, slowly, you realize you can't breathe.

It's like there's a hole in your lungs, right in the center of your chest, or some kind of growth pushing outwards and crushing your ribs from the inside. Somehow it's painless, but the fear makes up for the pain now, as you claw at your skin and try to see through it, try to find out what that bird did to you, what your brother did to you. Is he still here? You call out for him and find no answer.

You black out again. 

You don't know for how long.

~!~

Your mouth tastes like dirt when you open your eyes again. You're weak, and thirsty, and your head hurts, but the aches in your body are gone besides the expected ones from sleeping on the floor.

It's the middle of the day, and the sun is too bright. You hesitate to drink anything still, your brother's warning about the water haunting the back of your mind. But soon you can't take it anymore and just about throw yourself in the spring to cool down. The water tastes clean, and you drink your fill before dragging yourself onto the bank and staring up at the sky.

~!~

The crow never visits again. The temple has earned a reputation as a cursed place, with nothing to offer but bones and ghosts. You bury Kimon, who died in his bed, and then you try to leave.

You find you can't.

~!~

"That's all I remember." You tell Jake, who chews his lip thoughtfully. You don't want to talk about more, or answer any more questions. You're tired as you haven't been in a long time, and you still have things to do for the rest of the day. But you don't get up, not just yet. You don't want to alienate your only living companion since a literal bird from hundreds of years ago.

"Nobody came after that point, and I already told you that I tried to leave. Multiple times, even. But whatever my brother did, that's why I'm... well. You know."

Jake sighs, and rubs the back of his neck. "Your brother's a real piece of work." He says, putting his hands down on his knees and leaning his weight forward. The chickens still scratch around the dirt. "So, what about that magic shed of yours? The one you said has things you need no matter what."

You shrug. "I think he might have done something with that, too, but I don't know if I'll ever find out." 

You take a minute before asking him, when he doesn't bring it up. "... You think maybe it'd give us something to help with your curse?"

It would be strange if it did. It's never left anything alive in there before, but it started giving different things since Jake's arrival after all. You don't want to disappoint him if it doesn't, but you don't want him to have to keep leaving either.

He hums to himself and shakes his head. "We should probably try before discounting it, but I kind of doubt it'd be so easy as looking in a shed. Wish we could ask your brother what all this business was about, and if he meant to leave you hear."

"... Yeah." You say, and then you stand up. "Yeah, I wish I could ask him, too."


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit late. Somehow this feels like a short chapter even though it's actually a longish one.
> 
> Dirk continues to be thirsty.

There's still a lot to do for the rest of the day, but it goes by faster with Jake around, as you divide tasks between you. You sweep out the offering bowl, he gathers the honey and the wax from the bees. You kill and cook one of the chickens, pouring its blood onto the ground outside the temple at midday, he does something fancy and foreign with a summer vegetable soup in the kitchen. He even brought his own spices, this time, and says you can have them when he goes.

You're still not looking forward to that. Neither is he, by the looks of things now. You're still surprised when he offers to help you sort through all the scrolls you'd gathered, to rewrite them. 

"I can't write them or read them myself, but you can read them out to me and show me the shapes of the words, if not how they're really said." He says, gathering the rolls of paper from your arms, and spreading them out onto the floor. He has ink and a handful of quills in his rucksack, which he shows you, and an assortment of hollow metal styluses, gleaming and silvery. He holds one up for you. "I even have some pens, so we won't have to stop so often for the ink, at least until they run out."

"Your wonders never cease to amaze me." You say, turning it over in your fingers. It spills ink in your hand when you press on the pointed end.

You read out to him, recipes for medicines of ages past, the names of herbs, stories and histories. He writes it all down twice over, in his strange, looping script, and in the shapes of words you have to show him like you had to be taught when you first came here.

~!~

Unfortunately, the thing with this activity is that it involves being close to him for extended periods of time, murmuring back and forth while the two of you figure out just what you're trying to decipher. At first you think this is a good thing, because at least you won't let your mind wander to dark places, or nightmares, or the weight of centuries on your bones.

You don't realize exactly how frustrating this is going to be, on multiple levels, until you've been doing it for an hour.

The sun is still high and you really do want to get most of this sorted, but you're distracted. Your heart just isn't in it. The rest of your body isn't particularly interested in helming this endeavor, either, as your eyes will stop focusing on the page to trace the lines of Jake's hands, instead, or the curve of his mouth as he recites to himself what he's writing, and the things you've taught him.

He has worryingly soft-looking lips, and when he glances up at you, you look away slightly too late. "Is there something on my face?" He asks, touching his mouth. 

"Nothing." You say, and look back down. The heat of the day isn't making this any easier. You sigh. "We should take a break."

His fingers come away clean, but you've damned yourself further thinking of his hands and mouth at the same time, haven't you? Even slightly smudged with lampblack, his nails cracked and ragged, you remember the warmth of his grip and have to force your thoughts away from where they might go otherwise. You wonder if his mouth would match that warmth.

"Hmm." He tosses his pen in the air and catches it, before capping it and putting it away with the rest of his things. You try to help, you do, but you're off-kilter and you move too fast, knocking over the inkwell you'd been using. The world seems to slow down and speed up all at once, before you can do anything to move towards righting this, and ink splatters across pages clean and freshly written and even the old texts you'd been trying to rewrite.

You just about feel the soul leave your body. The ink spreads faster, before your very eyes, drawn across the pages until it finally stops and you're staring at the dark, glossy stain on the floor like it's going to swallow you up.

In fact, you stand there frozen for so long that you just about jump out of your skin when Jake puts his hands on your shoulders. "Hey! Hey. Dirk, are you alright? I don't think the inkwell broke, at least."

You come back to yourself slowly, slow enough that you don't quite hear what he says next, but not so slow that you don't feel a loss when he moves his hands off of you to bend down and gather up the ruined papers. You entertain the insane thought of grabbing him back, before the crushing weight of what just happened actually settles in.

So no, you're not going to ask him to hold your hand right now, because you're too busy staring at the wreckage of all the work you'd been doing the past hour and then some. He shakes some loose ink off a few of the pages and frowns when he sees just how bad the damage is, and you almost expect him to be angry at you for it.

(He should be. He was doing all the writing just now. You prepare for the worst, even though rationally, you should be more worried about how much information was just lost with your blunder. How many years of knowledge did you just destroy?)

"Well, fuck." He mutters to himself, though even to himself it's achingly loud in your ears. He sighs and once more you prepare for him to give up on you, but instead he lays all the papers carefully down as if they're still worth something covered in ink. "Looks like we'll have to start over later, but I think some of these are still probably okay, just a little blotty. Ink doesn't go all the way through and all, so at least a couple of these pages should be alright, right?"

He smiles and you're completely certain of a very different sort of doom by Jake English. 

You clap your hanging jaw shut, glancing down at the mess of papers he's tried to lay out. You still feel the sting of losing so much progress and so much old knowledge, but you feel slightly, _slightly_ less terrible for what he just said, so that's some progress right there.

"You're okay, right?" He asks, as you go through the unstained papers. "Nothing scratched up or bruised or anything?"

"Besides some of my pride, no, nothing's bruised." You lie, but it's a small one, and you can hardly feel the weight of it on your tongue between the things you actually want to say.

He picks up the empty inkwell, tosses it between his hands, and puts it back in his bag.

~!~

You think of the stain on the floor that you couldn't get out a few hours ago, while Jake helps you cook and the two of you get ready to turn in for the night. The shadows at this hour stretch long and smudged at the edges, almost crossing the hills before fading into the grass. The sunset, where you and Jake can see it, burns the sky gold and lavender-blue.

You sit beside him and pick through your food with your hands, sipping the soup from the bowl while he eats with a knife and fork, and occasionally glances at the way you do it. 

You've got a mouthful of chicken and lettuce leaves to chew through before you look to him and swallow. "What?"

"Nothing, really." He says, wiping soup off his mouth with a piece of cloth. His plate is empty by now, nothing but the bones and bits of loose skin and cartilage, and a couple leftover tomato slices. He picks up his soup bowl again and decides to forego the spoon this time, drinking it like you had and just watching the sun go down. 

It casts his face into sharp relief, despite the softness of the light; as if all the world is faded but he remains solid and real. You go back to picking slowly through your own food so you don't have to look at him and notice his eyelashes picked out in little flecks of gold, his high cheekbones and full lips.

You've been thinking about his lips entirely too much. You tell yourself it's because you've been alone so long, and your body continues to remind you of the fact. You're full of food and slightly sleepy after a day's work though, even besides reading the scrolls to Jake. 

You close your eyes for just a moment and lean back against the wall. For once, since Jake had come to you, everything is silent and still without you worrying that he'll disappear from your side, and when you open your eyes again, slowly, he's still there.

"What was it like?" He asks you. "Your home, I mean. Where you were born and where you lived before all of this; I don't think you ever really elaborated."

You're drowsy enough that you even let yourself lean against his side, shoulder to shoulder. He stiffens for a moment when you rest your head on him, but he doesn't push you away, and even relaxes after shifting around a little to get more comfortable. You hum to yourself, a lilting, wandering tune, before you tell him.

"I don't remember much of it." You say. "I remember my brother, and the freezing cold, more biting than the heat here. That's all."

"Not even what it was called?" He asks. You make a noncommittal noise.

"Thrace." You say. "But only in Greek, and I only learned that much later, here in the temple. I don't remember what it must have been named by the people who lived there."

"So this place is just about the only home you remember, huh." He says it so mournfully you almost want to remember just to give him something else to think about, but it's so far gone you don't even know if the place remains. 

If any of your home remains. 

(The temple has been home to you for ages longer than that smoky little hut, though; longer than it should have been for anyone.)

"What about you?" You ask him. The sun is just about to dip below the horizon by now, and you'll have to put your leftovers in the offering fire soon. "What was your home like?"

"Oh, you know." He says, chuckling to himself. "It wasn't so much a home as where we'd stow souvenirs and hold a couple garden parties, my gran and I. Home was really wherever the wind took us, from the cities of Siam to the jungles of Bengal. As long as we were roughly within earshot of each other, of course."

Silence falls over the two of you again, companionable rather than awkward or empty. Maybe you've left a lot more unsaid than you'd like, but it's nice all the same, to have him against you like this. Slowly, carefully, you drag your fingers through the grass and lay them over his hand.

It twitches, but stays still. You feel him turn to look at you.

"You're not actually falling asleep on me, are you, old chap?" He asks. There's that edge of nervousness in his voice again, that sense of looking down over a deep ravine and feeling it open below you, a twinge of fear despite being still and safe. Your first urge is to pull away, but he's warm and still, and you can pretend to be asleep, right?

"I'm not." You say. But you nuzzle up against him a little more. "I'm a little tired."

"Oh. Well. I do wish I could be a more comfortable pillow than this. But we really should get up soon, alright?" He shrugs a little so he can lean more comfortably against the wall. "Or not, if you decide to stay right there. I suppose I could catch up on my stargazing-"

You curl your fingers into the gaps between his, and feel more than you hear his breath hitch, a faint brush of air right beside you. 

"I'm not going to fall asleep." You say. "I just want to sit here for a while longer with you."

He doesn't make any sound that could be an answer to that, but you decide not to push your luck. When you're lucid and the air isn't full of golden light and the warmth of a meal, you'll come back to your senses and know this wasn't something usual for him. Probably. But for now, you can bask in the warmth, of the sunlight and a meal and Jake's side against yours, your head on his shoulder while he breathes slowly in and out.

~!~

You still feel slightly betrayed when, as the sunlight finally leaves you in semi-cool darkness, Jake stirs.

"Come now, Dirk, we have to get inside or we'll be eaten alive by mosquitoes or something out here." He says, gently shaking you so you get off him first. You loathe to do so, but you mumble something incoherent and let yourself be pulled to your feet. 

There's still the last of the day's rites to attend to, so he helps you carry the dishes inside, scraping leftovers into the offering bowl. When you make the fire and sing over it, when the bones, skin, and fat have been eaten up by the flickering flames, you look to Jake's face turned a little away from you and find him watching the smoke curl towards the ceiling. Maybe a prayer of his own is rising up with the embers, but you don't find it in you to ask. 

You sing until the flames burn low, half-walking, half-dancing around the fire in slowly tightening circles, your hands always on the lyre. It's only when all that's left is the throbbing light of embers and it's almost too dark to see by that you put it down at the base of the bowl's pedestal. 

You put your hand on Jake's shoulder, clearing your throat. He looks up to you with eyes dark and liquid, dark enough that you almost can't see the green. 

You can't count on him still being there in the morning. Your heart thumps beneath your tongue, but your voice is even and slow despite.

"Would you mind so much, sharing my bed again?" You ask. Your hand on his shoulder looks like that of a ghost. 

He takes long enough to answer you that you're struck with the want, almost the need, to explain yourself for the request, but then he takes your wrist and uses your grip to pull himself up standing. You imagine his touch lingers just a little longer than it really needs to on your skin, and that his smile is just that much warmer than really called for, for such a small thing.

"Well, if you're inviting it, I don't think I'd mind." He lets go of your wrist and says something about getting ready for bed, maybe with a quick wipedown to cool down first, but you're standing there at a loss, playing over what just happened. Your skin tingles with the memory of his.

That he accepted the invitation shouldn't come as that much of a surprise, should it? Or is this a sign of something to hope for?

"Still there, Dirk?" His voice pushes you back into yourself.

"I'm fine, sorry, just thinking." You have to stop doing that while he's here, or you'll be thinking away whatever little time you have with him. But it's hard not to dwell, when you're holding back so much. The two of you leave the main room and he lights a candle to light the way, the wax fresh enough to still smell of honey. You head to your room as he gets ready with his things.

It's a warm night. You strip down and lay on your side in the bed, facing the wall and ignoring the sheets pooled at your ankles. You breathe as slowly as you can manage while you're still so tense, still thinking too deeply into this. 

You need to be honest with him soon, right? You sigh, and you listen for him as he moves in the next room, until you hear his footsteps behind you and feel the dip in the bed. Soft cloth against your back when he lies down, from his shirt. He blows the candle out and plunges the room into soothing darkness.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE FINALLY HAVE SEXUAL CONTENT. WE'VE FINALLY EARNED THE EXPLICIT TAG.
> 
> Also there's like some dubious consent and self-loathing in this one because I'm just that kind of writer, but it all works out, I promise.

You don't dream this time, or at least you don't recall any of it if you do. But you know you've been asleep, because you wake up.

Well, maybe you don't really wake up all the way, because that would be too quick. You slowly rise out of sleep, and become aware of little things one after the other in no particular order. The sheets under your skin are slightly sweaty. Your arm is under your cheek, a little numb but bearable, and with a tacky spot from where you'd drooled on it. More than these, you notice the weight against your back, like being pressed against the wall, but with too much give and too much warmth to be the unyielding stone.

Breath against your ear. A jutting hardness behind you, against the curve of your ass, familiar and yet not in the heat and weight. A heavy hand on your hip. You're drifting but your body remembers the feeling like remembering how to walk after a long dream, is grounded entirely in the points of contact between you and the body behind you.

You don't make a sound, but you arch your back as natural as anything, pressing against the warmth. You feel the bed shift under the weight of both of you, the hand joined by another; you had your arm under your head, but there was another under the pillow, and they curl their fingers through yours when you offer them. You breath in, feeling the breath well in your lungs with the coolness of morning and the heat of someone else's breath, and when you breathe out you feel an echo of it against the back of your neck.

You push back against your lover's cock and feel him shift just so, grinding against you; the sheets are tangled over your legs, and he has one laid over you, like he's holding onto you with his whole body. You feel cloth between you, though; the faint rasp of coarse hair on the chest against your back is muffled by silky fabric.

It comes back to you at last, and you go still and terrified in his grip. 

Jake English, lost in time and returning to you despite. You'd invited him into your bed, expected nothing to come of it (expected to be the one to ruin this for yourself, expected to cross a boundary you couldn't see and were afraid to find.)

But you haven't ruined it, not this time. You haven't chased him away, scared as you were to have him for yourself, scared that he would have someone for himself in his own home and time, wherever and whenever that may be. You feel his breath against your neck, a slow exhale that makes your skin tingle, and you feel heat spread out from every point of contact anew. It centers in the pit of your gut, and peaks between your legs. 

It's uncomfortable as nothing else is, to have your desire flare up like this, looking you in the face when you look down at yourself. Embarrassing, too; hundreds of years and without fail, your cock is hard in the morning. This time, you don't have the option of relieving yourself subtly, and you're not sure if, after all this time, you can do it  _quietly_.

A part of you wants to wake him up so you can go deal with this somewhere more private. Another part of you, stronger, tells you that he's just the same. _More so_ , probably; when you move your hips back and away, you feel his hands tighten on your skin. You feel him nuzzle against your shoulder, against the back of your neck. You feel his stubble and it makes you shiver, with the itch and with the arousal that burns through you.

You bite your lip around a moan, hear him mumble something behind you. Is he awake? Is this something you can go on with if he is awake? You can make out some of what he's saying despite the slurring, and you gulp as you listen, press your lips tight around another moan as he moves his hips against yo. He ruts slowly, sleepily, against your flesh. There's almost no way he's awake, but your heart won't stop thumping at the thought that he still might be, that he's only half-asleep and could really _want_ this. 

You can feel his lips tracing the shape of the words into your skin. "There we go, you're so good for me, lovely thing that you are..." He pets the shallow curve of your hip and you ache for more than that, but you're fighting yourself every step of the way, because you don't want to be nothing but a dream and you don't know if he's going to disappear midway through touching you. You don't want to leave him like that, or for him to leave you like that.

But by every god you know the name of, you want him, and you can't stop yourself from pushing back against the next roll of his hips. He purrs sweetly as his hand slides lower, seeking the warmth of you, palm over your lower abdomen and dangerously close to your cock. You want him to reach down and take hold, but you're trapped against him; one hand gripping the sheets, the other tangled with his own and you don't want to move in case you break him out of this.

Is he still dreaming? 

He could be. He's shown no indication that you're more than a body in a dream right now, petting over the skin of your belly and then through the sparse, pale hair above your cock, but never reaching lower. It's a terrible way to be teasing you. You're so hard it hurts, your cock lying neglected against your thigh while your lower back is getting poked at until he shifts lower and presses himself tight to the cleft of your ass.

Wrong angle for actually getting into you, and you're thankful for that, because you want him so bad but not bad enough to take him dry, especially at a size like that. You're getting a better idea of how big he actually is now that his cock is wedged between your inner thighs, and it must feel good to him because he thrusts- not faster, but harder, in long, slow, surprisingly powerful inward pushes, the leg hooked over yours pulling you closer.

You whimper. You want to touch yourself. You never want this to end, and you just want to take a cold bath or take him or just touch yourself until you actually get yourself off, but you can't because then it'll have to stop. You arch again, crooning softly to him, pressing your legs tighter so he has something better to push into, and he rewards you by murmuring some kind of pleased noise and actually taking a firm hold of your cock.

There is no fucking way he's asleep. You yelp in surprise, nearly knocking your head against him. He mumbles something else, but now you just- you thrust into his hand, biting your lip so hard you're sure you're going to bruise it, and he's kissing the curve of your shoulder while he jerks you off, slow and lazy and frustrating. He's still moving. You can't breathe.

"Please," You exhale, all in a rush, and suck it back in so hard it sounds like a sob when he drags his hand down to the base of your cock and then squeezes his way back up. Your inner thighs are wet with sweat and his pre-come, and you ache. You squeeze his hand, pull it close and kiss his knuckles. "If you're awake, you've got my _immediate_ permission to- to just-"

You can't continue it, not without being cut off with another moan, but his hand stills and you want to scream. You hear him mumble something, your thighs wetter than earlier, warmth seeping down the curve of your leg and into the sheets. "Jake, _please_." You mutter, and then you groan. " _Please_ tell me you're not going to just leave me after you came."

He mumbles something else, and then your heart drops down to the fucking floor because he lifts his head and speaks right in your ear. "... Dirk?" He's quiet for a second, and then probably realizes exactly where he is, how he's holding you. "Oh. Oh my God."

Your eyes are wide open now, and the brunt of what just happened hits you like a punch to the gut. You feel like trash. You are trash. You let yourself get carried away and now he's never going to want to touch you again, and that's secondary to the fact that he probably didn't want this _and_ you've probably just ruined a whole lot of things between you and him, mostly for him. You want to crawl out of the bed and let him lay into you with- with his fists maybe, or just words, or whatever you might deserve for letting this happen.

He's not moving. Is he in shock? Do you dare to move and have him realize just what kind of a terrible person you are?

"Um." He says, awkwardly, and untangles himself from you. "You're. That was. Uh. Are you alright? Don't think that's happened to me in quite some time, sorry. I, uh, guess I was a rather bit pent up there, um." He gulps. "You're alright, right? I should probably get out of this bed and wash up, ah, I didn't mean- by which, that was rather ungentlemanly of me, and I apologize if I've made this- oh, bother."

Understatement of the century. Several centuries, even. But you grip his hand harder and he stops pulling away, even when you loosen your grip. When you turn to face him, as much as you can in the awkward position you two are in, he goes quiet and tries his best not to look into your eyes.

"Um." He starts again.

"Sorry." You say, quickly, maybe too quickly. "If you- I thought you were asleep. I didn't want to wake you."

You conveniently leave out the part where you kind of wanted him to touch you more, but the look on his face tells you he knows. More than that, he confirms he knows.

"Yeah." He says. "I um. That last bit there. Yes, that; I suppose that was a thing that definitely did happen, right? Uh. I don't want to be out of bounds with you or anything, so, ah, I hope it's alright? That you're alright? Mind you, I'm no stranger to a little hot and heavy between myself and a friend, because it does get lonely out in the wilds of the world and I- well, maybe I've been spending too much time away from home, you know, you get some interesting ideas about _relations_..."

He trails off, letting it hang in the air between you that suddenly feels a lot wider and emptier than it did just a minute ago. And damn it all, your cock is still hard, which he notices because his hand is kind of loosely laid on top of it. You cough.

"I didn't mind, to be clear." He says, and you can practically feel him radiating embarrassment. You let the thought of what he says roll around in your head for a minute before you say anything else that could potentially damn you. When you decide on what to say, you say it very slowly, and very carefully.

"You didn't mind getting off... " You start, and gulp. "Or you didn't mind touching me?"

It sounds a lot heavier when you've said it, stains the back of your teeth something bitter and metallic. He lays his cheek against your shoulder again, maybe listening to your breath, or your heart, while the two of you just lay there and his seed dries tacky and gross with the sweat on your legs. You'll need to wash these sheets pretty thoroughly, you think, and then you wonder why the fuck you're thinking of the sheets at a time like this, when he still hasn't answered you.

He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, still half-curled around you. "You know," He says, just as carefully as you had. "It's the darnedest thing, you see; I _would_ be certain, had circumstances been different, that I'd gone and bungled things downright _explosively_."

You're not sure what he's getting at, but he's not pulling away, and you really kind of need to pee now that your arousal is flagging. It's one of those biologically disgusting details that strike you at the worst possible moment, and now that you've noticed, you can't help but fixate on it. You try to get comfortable, lying half-under him as you are, and that only makes it more noticeable. Jake doesn't seem to notice, though, as he goes on.

"I don't really know what to say about it. I don't really want to think about it, and that's already more honest than I've been in a good long while about things like this, but here we are anyway." He says. His arm is still on top of you, though blessedly (or maybe damnably), his hand has left the general vicinity of your crotch. You don't squirm again, but now you're counting breaths. 

He chuckles, warm and comforting, or it would be comforting if you weren't still hung up on thinking you've made a mess of your friendship. But he shifts so he's not almost crushing you, so you can breathe again, even though you feel outright hollow without his weight pressing you down. You count cracks in the wall, somehow managing to get to maybe twenty of the little ones before he's rolled over onto his back.

"Could you say something? Please? I'm getting some mixed messages with this silence here, and- well, I'm not used to _asking_ , but if you'd be so kind..." The way he mentions it is cutting and pleading all at once. You're still holding his hand, your grip probably a little painful now that you think about it; your nails are getting a bit long, and even with his skin so toughened by the sun and whatever else he gets up to out there, you've always had sharp ones. 

You loosen your grip a little, but you don't move your hand away. It takes a while to find your voice again, when you roll over into the space he left for you so you're nuzzled up against his side with his arm still under your neck.

"I have to preface that I'm... reeling, somewhat." You follow the line of his nose with your eyes, and trace it down to his slightly-parted mouth. "I don't want to push anything, but only because I know if I give myself a step it'll stretch into a mile. I know this, I've done it before, and it's taken an immeasurable amount of restraint for me to not scare you away."

His eyes go wide in surprise and you think he's about to say something but he just laughs instead. It's not a mocking laugh, either; he stops, and starts again, and it actually sounds relieved, and yet you can't help the heat that creeps across your face.

"What?" You ask. "It's true. I don't want you to go and never come back. I wanted to give you a reason to _keep_ coming back, even without the possibility of me helping you, or leaving myself."

"I shouldn't laugh, I know, I'm sorry." He reaches up with his other hand and tips your face slightly to the side towards his, and he looks at you like he's never looked at you before, though you don't know what it means. There's a crease of concentration between his eyebrows, and just the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth and lips. 

"You're a real surprise you know, all this time I thought you were being cold to me, or maybe I was imposing on you and sacred hospitality or loneliness were the only things that kept you from throwing me out on the road. All this time I had the sinking feeling you were just putting up with me, for whatever reason your pretty head could draw out; you were really thinking you would scare me away?"

You stare at him. The lines of pale little scars, the dips of pockmarks and sunburn. Stubble and oversized teeth. He's not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, but he's wormed his way into the very being of you, and you don't think you would get him out if you'd tried. 

It looks like he'd gone and done most of it on accident, too.

"I thought you wouldn't want me." You say, slowly. You glance away, your face hot for reasons completely unrelated to being naked and come-stained next to Jake English. "I came up with- with so many reasons why you couldn't possibly want me, why the little things like looking away and saying where you came from- I _really_ thought..."

You shake your head. "You're just as bad at showing your intentions as I am." You say. "What am I going to do with you, Jake English?"

"Full name? I'm quite the scoundrel if someone like yourself should say my name like that." He waggles his eyebrows, and you- you almost resist the urge to laugh, but at this stage, why bother?

It comes out a small, pitiful thing, unused to the shape of your throat,  but it makes Jake's eyes _shine_.

"I think I'm the one who should be afraid, you know." He says, softly, a secret between the two of you. "You're almost not real, and yet I have you in my arms, in a bed, a part of me all over you in places. It's like catching a sunbeam, to have you."

You snort.

"Now you're being overdramatic." You say, but you blush anyway, because it's been a long time since anyone has looked at you with any kind of feeling, like this or otherwise. It's a combination of several things you recognize; devotion, you're used to, even after all this time, and lust, awe, curiosity, all things you've been looked at like, as if they were what you were made for. You were an unreal thing to the pilgrims and an aid of the gods to the temple stewards.

But just this once, and you're not sure how, Jake English makes you feel mortal. It's as terrifying as it is precious, to be held and be looked at as someone that belongs with other people, and you hadn't realized how much you'd missed being a part of something like that.

You can't place what part of his expression tells you this, but you want more. Now that you've had this moment, just this once, you don't know if you can stop.

You don't think you want to stop. The fire in your belly returns full force. You drape an arm over Jake's shoulder and draw him close, fingers in his thick, dark hair,  and his breath hitching just for a moment before easing out in a moan as you press a kiss to his lips.

You can have this, just for a while. You can let yourself have this.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another intermission coming after this, and then we'll actually have some progress again.

You would very much prefer to stay in your bed all day and just keep getting familiar with Jake's body and your own, and all the ways you two fit against each other, and it's a challenge to wake yourself up enough after you've worked yourself up and finished off a couple times.

Your legs are sticky with more than just Jake's come at this point, though, and your mouth feels much the same after you half-remembered, half-guessed how to suck him off properly. He sort of returned the favor, though with his teeth in the way, you were more than content to have him just stroke and lick you instead.

It's not that much longer later you imagine, when you've finally worked out how pent up you were. You're exhausted and sweaty, but with a warmth in your body that spreads to every part of you, centered in your middle. It holds you close to Jake for a while longer, just lingering at his side until the thought of your poor chickens and the feeling of being covered in bodily fluids get you moving.

Jake tilts his head up to watch as you gather your things so you can have a bath, and if you bend down with a bit more slow deliberation than you have to, you can admit that it's entirely for his viewing benefit. He even whistles, and you smile to yourself, the well of warmth in your chest pulsing softly with the sound.

"It's a bit of a rush, isn't it?" He says, leaning back to get a better view of you. "All this happening all at once, I mean, but I can't find it in me to complain about how it's all turning out."

You raise an eyebrow and stand up from where you're lacing up your sandals, though the smile you started is starting to creep up your face a little further. "How it's all turning out?"

"You know." His teeth flash brightly in the low light of the room as he smiles, but then he goes and lets himself look bashful, somehow, despite that his tongue was all over your cock just a few minutes ago. "This... whatever you want to call it. I think, if it's a thing between us, that is."

Dust motes dance in the sunbeams between the ceiling slats, and some of the light picks out his hair and body. He looks warm and inviting, content as he is to lie there and leer playfully at you. You want to burn the memory into every part of you, carry it in your very bones.

"I think I might." You say. You lean over him and press a kiss to his mouth, the taste of  yourself and the taste of him mingling in a way that's honestly pretty disgusting, but it's Jake so you don't have it in you to care. Your tongue swipes against his lips as you part. "Now get out of my bed so we can go bathe and wash the sheets. I don't want to sleep in our combined stains later."

He laughs again, a thrilling, wondrous sound. You never want to let him go, and it pains you to think about that, casts a faint shadow across the warmth of the little world you have with him.

~!~

He brings it up when you least expect it, and yet you can't bring yourself to be particularly surprised when he does. Your hair is barely dried from when you'd bathed, still frizzy and curling around your ears slightly damp and entirely unsightly, and the two of you are soaking the stained sheets in a clear part of the brook, away from the watercress and reeds.

"Do you think your magic shed could work for someone besides yourself? Without being an initiate  of the temple, that is." He helps you spread the sheets out over a drying line when the stains are soaked and scrubbed out. They're slightly yellowy with age now, and you think about the shed and whether or not you'll have to look around in it for more, or if it will give you something to spin and weave instead. It's done that before, and you hate using a loom, you really do.

"Hmm." You tug on the corners of the sheet so it lines up with the other side, and then tie them together so they don't come off the line. "There was nobody who could try besides me. There was nobody but myself here, by the time I'd discovered the shed, and I know it wasn't there before because we had to make or trade for everything we had, if it wasn't donated. Do you need something?"

He shrugs, and runs his fingers over the damp, thin cloth, before going around it to your side. "I was just thinking."

"About?" You're still kneeling on the ground to check the edges, and then you stand up.

He shrugs again, hands in his pockets. "If, well. If it was made for you or somesuch, I don't know if this will work at all, but I thought that since it goes with what you might need- how does that work? How does it know what you need at the time?"

You pick up the basket you'd carried the sheets in and head towards the garden, while Jake follows at your side ready to take the basket from you when you start gathering the ripened vegetables. 

You press your fingers against a few promising-looking squash while you speak. "Wish I knew that either. I think about what I need and it's either in there or something close to it is. I've tried to test it out with things I just _wanted_ , but nothing came of that. Just an empty shed with empty boxes and empty sacks."

You wonder if there's any way to dry and preserve a few, so maybe he can bring some with him when he has to go.

(You hate that you're starting to think of when he has to leave already, but you know you don't have a choice. You hate that, too.)

None of the squash are ripe right now, so you move on to tomatoes and eggplants, and Jake mumbles to himself something you can't quite catch about having to test it out. You blink at him when he holds out the basket, and you realize he's just trying to get done with the garden faster.

You gently lay the eggplants along the bottom of the basket, making a sort of cradle for the tomatoes. "What do you want from the shed?"

He looks pained, and then ashamed, and he takes entirely too long to answer. At least you have an answer, when he gives it, though he gives it slowly and almost sounds like he's dragging it out of his throat. It's not one of the better ways you've heard him make noise.

"Well, just." He scratches the back of his head, putting the basket down. "I thought maybe it might give us something written, or it might give me something from home. I thought I could maybe use it to, uh, well, just to test the boundaries of the curse. Or spell? Blessing? I don't actually know entirely what to make of it in your case, especially if it's providing for you."

He crouches beside you and you move a little to the side so he has the space to help you feel around the leaves. The tomatoes are plump and actually overripe, and you don't know how you hadn't noticed these ones as they are, clusters of them practically ready to burst under your fingers. You lay them in a little pile in the middle of the eggplants, the ripest surrounding the slightly less ripe so they don't squish all over the place.

When he stands, you look up at him slowly, where he's haloed by the sun from your perspective. Sweat drips down the sides of his face, down his bare shoulders. You yourself are starting to feel a little too warm, even though you're in the relative shade of a trellis.

"We can try." You say. "There's not much that can go wrong, I think."

You stand up, brushing little clumps of dirt off your knees. He helps you steady yourself with a hand on your elbow as you tap your sandals to a particularly stubborn clump out, and then the two of you carry your haul back inside while the sun burns across the hills. 

~!~

Even the grass is spun dry and golden at this time of year, and the heat that rises off the hard-baked earth is intense enough that you can feel it through your soles when you step outside. You would look forward to staying indoors for the rest of the day around this time of year, in a way you usually don't; it's cooler inside after all, especially in the areas where the wind can stir the muggy air and the stone is thick and shielded from the light.

This time around, you itch out of your skin to get back outside, and the walls feel like they're closing in even as they shield you from the unforgiving light of the sun. Jake seems to be taking it much worse than you, pacing in only his shorts and shoes before getting rid of his shoes too. 

You yourself, you watch him pace from where you're seated on a collection of old pillows you'd put together- musty and lumpy, the ones you've gathered over time before the shed decided to give you new ones (and it's weird to think that it could decide anything), but they're still serviceable enough for lounging in while you wait for the sun to go down.

You watch him make a circuit around the room a couple times, one of the larger rooms you'd cleaned out (you don't remember who's it was) with a window that lets in some of the breeze without making it unbearable. He can't seem to stay still, and it's making you want to get up and join him. You wonder where he manages to get all this pent up energy even after all the travelling he does, and fucking you for maybe an hour this morning. It's making you a little dizzy to watch him, too, so you lie down and close your eyes in your pile.

The shutters had rotted off the one window a long time ago, so it's not exactly a good spot for staying long, but for just resting between things you need to do, it's fine. He blocks off the blinding light every time he passes by it, and the shadow falls across your face where you're almost out of reach of the light.

"Is something wrong?" You finally ask, after his fifth or sixth circuit. You open up one eyelid and look at him upside-down, tilting your head up from the floor to see him.

"Nothing." He says. Then he sighs and drops beside you, running his fingers through your hair casually as you please, like you're a pet. You walk a couple fingers up his thigh and dig the points of your nails into his knee until he relents with a ticklish laugh. "Okay, impatience, perhaps. I'm curious! You said you'd never had anyone else try the shed, and I don't know what I'll find."

"Probably nothing, you know." You tell him, but he sighs heavily and you open your eyes again. "But not for lack of trying. You can try later, when it's not so hot. Or you could try now, but wouldn't you rather rest after helping me carry things around?"

He grumbles something you can't hear and you walk your fingers down to his hip this time, and slide them across his lap. His voice hitches between what he was saying and you smirk to yourself, just a little bit.

"You know." You say, hooking one finger into a belt loop, just playing with it while he- presumably- looks down at you. You school your expression to stillness as you speak. "If you're so in need of a distraction right now, I'm right here. I could provide several _interesting_ suggestions for what to do while we're in this room, with nobody around, with no other tasks that we need to finish immediately."

"Oh- _ho!_ " He laughs, low and surprisingly sultry for someone like him. He takes your wrist and tugs your hand away from his middle, and when you open your eyes, he's raising your hand to his mouth. For one second you think he's going to kiss your hand, and he sort of does when he presses a finger to his bottom lip, before he sucks it into the heat of his mouth.

Your thoughts stutter to a halt, and his eyes twinkle mischievously as his tongue curls around the first knuckle. You stare, and you feel a different sort of heat pool in your face and elsewhere.

"Jake, my hands are filthy." You start, and he grins as he pops the finger out from his mouth, shining with spit. You can't believe you're fucking _blushing_.

"Well we're going to be getting filthy either way, aren't we?" He chuckles, pressing a kiss to your knuckles this time. "And besides, weren't you the one who had _interesting_ _suggestions_ for what to do next?"

You can't disagree there. You twist your wrist to the side in his grip so you can curl your fingers in his hair again, drawing him down towards you. 

"Don't be too smug." You say, as you press a kiss to his mouth again, and then another one to his cheek, just beside his ear "Smug isn't a great look on you. And I think we're going to need some supplies before we can proceed with my suggestions."

Well, that gets his attention like nothing else. Your hand wanders down his bare chest, down his abdomen, and over his lap where the lump of his cock behind his shorts is making itself known. You suck on the shell of his ear and then, with every part of you complaining from the movement and for getting further away from him as opposed to _closer_ , you stand up and straighten your clothes out a little.

"Wait here." You say, as much of a command as you can make it, and he does a little salute and a wave as you leave the room. 

There's bound to be something you can use on him, because you don't actually have any idea what you're talking about and you don't want to think about your brother giving the shed any capability to think about _this_. The kitchen, maybe? There's probably something there, right? If you come back empty-handed, it'll just look bad. Olive oil?

... Maybe olive oil. You've done things with it before, just to smooth the movement of your fingers, for tools or for other things. 

You'll bring it plain for now, no need to experiment just yet. You at least don't take long to find it, you think, before going through your jars and bottles to find where you'd last placed it. Every so often, you check if you can still hear Jake in the next room, and sure enough, he's pacing while you look.


	15. Intermission 3: Thrift Shop by Macklemore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually wanted this to be a more fairytale-esque thing from Dave's POV but that didn't work out so now we have this instead. Anyway, enjoy! Back to the main story immediately after this.

The air here fucking stinks.

Quite literally, too, though you guess it's probably not as bad as you're making it out to be or you'd have packed up a long time ago, but you're still not a fan of Kowloon's particular local atmosphere anyhow. You're just glad that you managed to get as nice a place as you have this time around, with a ceiling fan _and_ air-conditioning, though the air-conditioning sucks ass anyway so you mostly rely on the fan to stir the air into something resembling breathable.

Not that it really works, but that's Kowloon, Hong Kong for you. Leave it to the modern day half of East Asia to make you miss the clusterfuck that was that weird bit of Eastern Europe you'd wandered around in only fifty or so years ago, and you're lucky to remember even the general geographical location of that, lately, being that you can't keep track of what countries you've been to and outlived anymore.

Your name is... well, actually, you have a whole bunch of them, so maybe a little more specific. Your current occupation: thrift shop owner, sort of, because it's not so much a thrift shop as a collection of all the garbage you've accumulated over the centuries, dumped semi-comfortably into the area you're squatting in, traded every now and again for silence and secrets. And food, because you can't talk unsuspecting fish into a basket around here.

You probably would've been kicked out a long time ago if the people here were less susceptible to magic. They don't want to see anything and you don't want to be seen. It works.

Terezi croons in your ear from her perch on your shoulder. _We've got company._ She says, so maybe it only works _most_ of the time.

"So act natural." You say, because you're nothing if not the concept of what the kids call a meme.

You ruffle the feathered collar of your jacket and turn around slowly towards the vague direction of the doorway, just in time for the bell to ring and a rush of hot air to blast you in the face as someone walks in. Blessedly, the door closes after them, and you don't have to gag too hard about getting a faceful of nasty summer-rain-and-garbage stank. You run your fingers through the feathers out of habit and try to get yourself straightened out as they get their bearings, and from their silence but the fact that they're still right in front of you, you imagine they're either staring or it's raining harder than you thought.

They're probably staring. You're a six-foot-two blind white guy with a crow that's almost a raven perched on your shoulder, half-living half-working out of what from the outside looks like an abandoned, unlit storefront in the bad part of town, and from the inside is actually cramped with miscellaneous junk, some of it probably cursed. It'd be a weird sight even if you _weren't_ a blind white guy in the bad part of Hong Kong.

So you play it up and do a little bow, your head staying level and probably in the direction of where eye-contact would be if there weren't your aviators on your face. Terezi sticks her beak in your ear again, describing your guest: Tall, but not taller than you just yet, though definitely a lot broader around the shoulders. Dark hair, deeply tanned or maybe mixed; it's twenty-eighteen so that part isn't of as much interest as it used to be.

Green eyes and over-sized teeth. A massive backpack that jangles slightly when he puts it down.

"Sorry to bother you, I wasn't expecting... anything to be in here, actually, though I didn't really want to wait outside for this, either . It's raining cats and dogs out there!" He says, while in your other ear, Terezi keeps track of where he is. It would be easier to ride in her head while she looked around, but then you wouldn't be awake to man the store.

The store isn't even really a store, especially with how you hide it, yeah, but you still like to _pretend_ it's more legit than that. You lean over the counter while he chatters on and shakes out his umbrella, while Terezi keeps watch and makes sure he doesn't do anything untoward. You know he won't, because you're familiar with Jake English's concept of chivalry, dinged and dented from the long years but still generally intact.

Also, you're faster than him even without your eyes, and you can vault over the counter to crack him over the head before he can pull out either of his guns. Terezi puffs up with a cackle that to Jake probably sounds like a shriek, because he stumbles backwards from whatever he was looking at at the sound.

"Play nice, come on, you know him, too." You murmur to her. She croons something rude and bites your earlobe, but at least she does it gently, as you feel around for your cane in a show of helplessness and finally step into what you're pretty sure is a lit spot. 

You lean on the cane as heavily as you can without making it obvious, speaking to the spot beside Jake. "So what can I do for you on this actually kind of godawful evening?"

He startles _again_ , so you guess maybe he wasn't facing the right way after all. In fact he startles right into you after slipping, presumably, on the puddle he'd tracked in. Terezi screeches and cackles at your expense, flying off your shoulder and, from the sound of it, back onto the expensive, well-loved, and definitely not working antique phone she uses as a perch.

"Hey, try not to ruin the merchandise, I'm _pretty_ sure it's rare stuff." You say, as you steady him back on his feet and miraculously manage not to get bowled over by what feels like a whole ton of dense actual muscle. "Can't actually tell if you're alright so you're going to have to tell me yourself."

"What in the Sam hell-" Oh right, he can't see you. You focus and feel the glamours drop away like a sheet of water, and you shake your head to get the last of it off of you. _Then_ his eyes stop sliding off of you, because he straightens himself up on his own. He clicks his tongue at you like you're a troublesome horse or some shit like that. "I never get used to that. What name are you going by this time?"

You smile at him, patting him heavily on the shoulder. "Dave, but don't tell anyone else around here that. Good to see you again, English. Or not see you, all things considered."

 _Don't steal my lines._  Terezi hisses in your brain.

 _They aren't your lines anymore._ You answer back. Carefully, you shuffle your way back to your seat, the ragged computer chair sinking under your weight. Jake follows after you, weaving around piles of junk with the kind of overly careful delicacy of someone too big for the place who hasn't seen it in too long and is having flashbacks about getting buried under piles of stuff. You hear him swear as he stubs his toe, and then again as something crashes to the floor with the tinkling crunch of shattering porcelain.

You don't actually remember what might have been in that spot. A fancy, painted Santa figurine, maybe, or one of those creepy glass-eyed dolls.

"Strider, huh?" He says, when he's finally found a spot that he can either stand innocuously in or sit precariously upon. You gesture to Terezi and she pulls a nearby tassel so the curtain behind you pulls away with a dramatic swish, and you push your chair back into the shadows while Jake tries to follow you with his eyes. "Interesting choice of name. I actually know another Strider; is it getting popular? Or do you perhaps know him?"

"Can't say I do." You don't stand, but you feel around the shelves here with the tips of your fingers, the shapes of the bottles and jars guiding your hands while you count from the left. "He someone important? Hold that thought."

You find what you think you're looking for, but just to make sure, you shake it, and then uncap it and give it a sniff. Yep, that's it alright. You roll back to Jake with your apple jam and stick two fingers into it, scooping out a dollop and eating it like that, while he continues on about this other guy. 

You don't have it in you to really listen, until Terezi flies back to your shoulder with something actually interesting.

 _He's talking about Dirk._  The words echo in your head like the bang of a gong. _As in **your brother** Dirk._

Apple goop splatters onto your lap and frown. Jake stops talking.

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" He says. You hear him shifting in his seat- so he'd found somewhere to sit after all- and he speaks a little closer to you. "I'm never entirely sure, if you don't mind my saying, with the mysterious headgear making things difficult."

"And they're going to keep making things difficult, so try to get used to it." You say, swiping off the jam as your frown deepens. He makes a disgusted noise as you suck it off your fingers and wipe your hand down on your shirt. "Repeat what you just said. No, not the grossed-out noises, I mean what you just said about your friend."

"Ah, so you _do_ know him! Glad to know I don't have to lead up to that for as long as I'd been expecting with you, you're a tricky one, you know that?" He sounds entirely too cheerful about that. You feel sick. You wave him off.

"Yeah, yeah, just say what you were saying again so I can pick it apart already." You grumble. You're tempted to put yourself to sleep then and there, really freak him out by possessing Terezi and chasing him around until he's properly cowed in your presence, but he just got here and you need to hear this; no need to shoot yourself in the foot on that front.

Some part of you chills at the thought that Dirk might be here, that Jake might have taken him from where even out of your reach he was safe. You've watched him through Terezi's eyes, but he'd always been alone. Has it been so long since you've checked up on your own brother that you'd somehow completely missed _this_ fucking development?

You listen and your frown deepens, your fingers twisting through the feathers in your collar. It comes to that point as Jake goes on, that you feel your very being sink to the floor as there gets to be no doubt about it with his descriptions. Somehow, and you're kind of freaking out about it, he's talking about your brother.

Before he can get any more words out, and he's already gotten out a lot of words, you reach across the space between the two of you and grab him by the shirt with both hands. You couldn't move him if you'd tried, so all you can really do is drag yourself closer to him while he stutters in surprise.

"Where did you find him?" You breathe in his face, so close you can almost see him, smudges of shadow in the burnt out world that's been the inside of your own head for centuries. " _How_ did you find him?"

He pauses, but slowly, he peels your hands off his shirt. "I think it'll be a fairer trade if you and I have some words about what he's doing trapped there in the first place, and _then_ I can tell you about how I made it into your little terrarium."

"Jake English, I swear to all the gods I know." You let him peel you off, but you're still not happy and you want to make sure he knows it. You can feel the crackle of magic behind your teeth, feel the shadows in the corners of the room listening closer. "How did you find my brother and get through the wards I put on the temple?"

His hands tighten on your wrists, and you can feel something blood-hot and bright as molten iron under his fingers. Your mind is just about racing through the possibilities when he speaks.

"Now you listen here, you." He says, in that way that sounds kind of ridiculous and fake that he does when he's trying to be taken seriously, but right now actually sounds like he means business. You curl your hands into fists but he doesn't let go. "I'd been getting the sneaking suspicion that you're the reason why Dirk hasn't been able to leave after all this time, and don't you think that's a bit of an injustice to him when you've been wandering the Earth yourself?"

You growl, and finally manage to tear your hands out of his grip. "Sneaking suspicion nothing, you fuck, I did what I did to protect him. He can't-"

"Can't what?" His voice is icy, but it rises and rises to a fever pitch with every word. Your skin prickles as he goes on. "Can't fend for himself? Can't handle that the world's changed and maybe he's a little out of it? Because that's utter flim-flammery and you know it; it sounds more like you're the one who doesn't want to admit that he can handle things without your _bullshit_ despite your attempts towards the contrary and it's frankly kind of ridiculous that you think the world is such a danger to someone like him that he has to live in a bubble!"

You laugh, sharp and hysterical. You want to slap him across the face. You _would_ , if you could reasonably aim for his face. He bristles.

"What's this, now?" You feel his hands on your shoulders, pushing you back up in your seat. "Hey, come on now you impossible old tosser, stop laughing! Stop laughing and tell me-"

"The night after I let him get on that fucking boat to Crete, I had a Dream."

He sputters. "What does that have to do with _anything?!"_

You sag in your seat, running a hand down your face. You even take your shades off, and drop them somewhere onto the floor beside you. When you look up at Jake, or at least tilt your face up so he can see what's left of your eyes- and you know it's not pretty, the skin around them burnt and melted into a scarred ruin, the eyes themselves unseeing and pale- you tell him about why you let them burn. Terezi's presence curls heavily around your mind, brightening the memory as if you could see again.

"Dirk was practically knee-height when our parents had fucked off to, well, nobody knows where, so I brought him to a witch and asked her to give me something that would make sure I could take care of him no matter what. She said I'd have to pay for it, and I didn't ask her what I was paying for exactly or how, so she rubbed her thumbs over my eyes and where she touched me I burned."

"But here's the thing- when I go to sleep, I have normal dreams, yeah, and then there's these Dreams with a capital D. I can't see anything, but I hear things, like I'm walking around a room with my eyes closed. In this case, what I heard was I'd followed him to Crete, five years in, and the gods struck the temple down with no survivors. Not even my brother, who had nothing to do with how they'd gotten up there, not really."

Jake goes quiet, but you can imagine his face: Lips pressed tight, like he wants to interrupt, arms crossed. You smile to yourself like the bastard you are.

"So I had the souls of three of his caretakers bound to me at the time, and I figured they'd promised to take care of him and rescinded already. They were forfeit to me, and what was I going to do with them?"

"I spat one of them into the fire, and I told them to watch my body while I took my own soul to Crete in the form of a bird. They were free if they did this for me, and I did this thrice. The third time, Dirk died, and I plucked his soul out of his mouth."

Silence. You fold your fingers in front of you. Jake scratches something in the vague direction of probably the back of his head.

"So where's Dirk's soul now?" He asks. You press your lips tight and shake your head.

"Not where I'm going to give it to you." You answer. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"

Just in time for you to push away from him, Terezi swoops across the room and starts harassing Jake in a flurry of beak and feathers. He swears as he tries to bat her away, but he can't grab a hold of her before he trips over his bag. She flies back to you, landing on your shoulder and preening, cackling in the back of your mind.

"Now get out of here." You say, and you take hold of his curse, and _push_.

The world ripples outwards from your hand, and it's just you and Terezi in here now. The rain continues pouring outside.

 _You know you'll have to let him out of there eventually._ She tells you, and you frown and pick at the stain on your shirt. You can almost hear her grinning. _He'll resent you if Jake tells him what he just learned. Keep that in mind._

 

END INTERMISSION


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this chapter had to be rewritten like four times, it was really fighting me the whole way.

You come back and Jake is nowhere to be seen, which, honestly figures, because you spent a considerable amount of time looking for other things to bring with you into the room. You have an armful of things you'd had to look around for, including the oil, some berries, and a manuscript someone had tucked away in their room with some _vivid_ illustrations that you're surprised have survived until now. (You'll have to thank their meticulous storage habits for that.)

So when you come back and he and his things have disappeared, you have to barely contain your disappointment. You think of tossing the bottle against the wall in a fit of pique, but that would just be a waste of good oil. You're still thinking about him, and the room still smells faintly of him, and damn it all.

You sit down in the middle of your pile of pillows while the sun streams through the window, still leaving long shadows across your skin when you snuggle into the pile and start morosely eating the berries. You'd planned to be eating them off him, but without him around, you don't exactly want them to go to waste.

They're ripe enough to burst between your teeth, slightly too sweet. You wonder if you could have made wine with them, or something to that effect. You kind of want alcohol right about now.

You suck berry juice off your fingers and sigh, closing your eyes. 

Of course it would be when you're beginning to doze that you hear a loud crash and a clatter in the kitchen, this time followed by Jake's swearing.

...

 _Jake's_  swearing, and you're already on your feet, almost before you even realize what you're hearing, carrying your bowl of berries with you.

You find him trying to pick up the pieces of a plate, his rucksack rattling and bumping into things as he tries to put things away. You cross your arms and lean against the door frame, eyes narrowed at him. 

"Were you planning on leaving so soon or is this some kind of joke?" You say, brittle and pointed. When you step into the room and sweep some of the shards from in front of him with your foot, he looks up at you with a frown, before he looks ashamed of that and looks away. You're taken aback by that only long enough to be twice as annoyed by this when you recover. 

"What's with you?" You just about hiss. "You were being impatient in there, I know, but did I really take so long to pick some fucking fruit that you decided it was time to abandon me here?"

"Abandon you? I- wait." His brow creases in confusion and he holds his hands up. "Wait, hang on, just wait. You can be mad at me, but how long as it been since you last saw me?"

"How long since-" You stare, flatly. "You disappeared again. Somewhere into the past or future, I'm assuming."

"Well, yes, that's kind of how this curse _works_." He snaps, before taking you by the shoulders. "I'm a bit surprised I ended up back here, to be honest. How long was I gone?"

You pull away from him and have to stop him from falling into the shards, and that makes you feel cruel, but right now you feel like being cruel.

But you're not going to be petty. You pride yourself on as much, if there's nothing else to pride yourself on. "Only about an hour." You answer, as truthfully as you can measure it. He chews his lip, counts under his breath.

"I've been gone two weeks." He breathes, laughing softly. "And apparently I met the bastard you call a brother. Known him a little longer than that, even, and he was the one who sent me right back here! I should say that was deeply rude of him, to cut me off like he did, but I suppose it's for the best. At any rate, I'd like to give him a few more pieces of my mind for that, and a choice number of other topics besides!"

He huffs. "So let's see, it's about twenty-nineteen this year last I checked, maybe I could find him again, hopefully he hasn't packed up and left Kowloon just yet but where would he go if he has?"

You stare at Jake as he rattles off where your brother might be, places you'd never heard of and might not have existed hundreds of years ago. You stare as he finally realizes you're staring, even when he snaps his fingers in front of your face; but you're not staring, not really. You're looking past him.

It's impossible for you to fixate on anything else. He knows your brother. He knew your brother, and didn't know he was speaking to him this entire time.

More than that, somewhere out there, your brother is _alive_.

You stop Jake from standing with a hand on his forearm, tugging him back down to eye-level. "Can you bring him here?" You ask, looking at him now, _really_ looking at him. "You said- you said my brother is out there. That he's alive. You said my brother is alive."

He pauses his tirade to hold onto you, too, his gaze searching your face for... you're not sure. You're not happy with not being sure, either, but whatever it is, it doesn't look like he can find it. He purses his lips and laces his fingers in yours, but the next thing he says, his tone is resolute.

"I'll drag him kicking and screaming if I have to, but you'll have to wait for it until I do." He says. Then, ruefully, he adds. "I wish I could bring you even if I knew I wasn't going to be able to. He told me as much himself, and a few other things besides, and I think it's only fair that before I go, I get you up to speed."

You chew the inside of your cheek, a chill going up your spine; but despite everything, you trust Jake and you don't really have a choice right now. Not if you want to see your brother again.

Selfishly, you hear a little voice deep in your heart telling you that you've gotten used to Jake's company too. Too much, even. While you desperately want to see the one person left in this world that you can call something like family, you don't want to lose the one person who's been your only company for so long now. Not yet.

You need to give yourself a little time to get used to the idea; and besides, you want to spend as much time as you can with Jake before he has to go.

"So what did he say?" You ask him, but it's like he doesn't hear you, because he busies himself looking away from you and trying to get his balance with his rucksack on his back, just enough to get the shattered pieces of glazed clay off the floor. You help him stand and gather the remnants of broken plates, though after a second you just have him sit down on his rucksack to keep it out of the way, with how it rattles other things around you whenever he moves.

The largest broken pieces have to be thrown away, but you'll find more plates in the shed, probably. It occurs to you that he still hasn't tried to get anything out of it; that you'd promised to have him try later today. The sun has gone down and the heat has bled from the air, with only the stars waking in the East and the fading ribbons of sunlight still clinging to the clouds still illuminating the sky. 

But he doesn't mention the shed like you expect him to, and he doesn't try to avoid this. He frowns and looks down at the shadows crawling steadily across the floor, but tells you what he's learned. Your brother is still alive, and the reason _you're_ still alive, and somewhere hidden away, perhaps not even in this world, is your soul.

That he doesn't want you to find it again is evident, but it troubles you that if he'd been alive all this time, he didn't come to you himself. Jake takes one look at you as you think it over and his voice trails off, almost mid-word. The silence stretches on between the two of you until it's almost too dark to see, and the world outside the door is silvery-blue with moonlight. 

You stand up from where you're kneeling, your knees and ankles sore with how long you've been sitting on your calves. You grit your teeth as you stand, and walk outside to toss the broken bits of plate into the brook. When you head back to the temple, Jake is already lighting the oil lamps and a few candles. He looks at you in the doorway, his face cast warm and soft in their glow.

You want to hold onto that, too. You want to hold onto _him_. But you brush past him towards the counter and look through the basket of vegetables you'd gathered for the day instead, and set your mind to cooking something for the evening. Your bowl of berries is still there, and you pick one up and push it into your mouth, the juice thick on your tongue.

Jake stands beside you and, quietly, passes you things as you ask for them. You think he might be thinking about his newest quest, to find your brother and bring him to you. You imagine it'll at least be more possible than finding a long-dead familiar in a new body, but also, you know it's going to take him a long time.

Your brother was never easy to find when he didn't want to be.

~!~

It's late by now, and you can feel it, but you're not sure why you can't sleep. It's becoming more and more of a problem for you, these bouts of insomnia, and this time you can't blame it on not having a warm body pressed against your back.

Jake's arms are wrapped loosely around your waist, his breath ruffling your hair slightly. He snores, but not loudly; more a faint whistling through his teeth. You'd never noticed it before, but maybe only because you'd never had the chance to really consider it.

This time he's got his back to the wall, and you're facing the rest of the room. You don't toss and turn, but you shift every so often, trying to get comfortable without waking him. Every time you think you're about to drift off, every time you expect to open your eyes and be in a dream, you open them to the dark room instead.

You almost want to climb out of bed and light the oil lamp, maybe to read something by, or to go through the trinkets Jake's made for you. He spent a lot of time whittling pieces of old wood with a small knife while waiting for the sun to set with you, on the days neither of you wanted to work on deciphering and rewriting old scrolls. 

His hands have little scars, pale against the rest of his dark skin. Not all of them are fresh, or from the whittling. Sometimes you think they're from everything he's seen in the past and future, but you never ask.

You ask yourself why you never do.

You can't come up with an answer that satisfies you, not really.

He mumbles something inaudible against your shoulder, tightening his grip around you.The arm slung over your waist pulls you closer and your breath catches when you think he's waking up, maybe you weren't as quiet or as still as you'd thought, but then he goes right back to snoring against you. 

You breathe out a sigh of relief, and maybe a measure of disappointment comes with it. You're pretty sure you're never going to work up the nerve on your own, no matter how much you know the time you have on this visit is likely running out. Maybe faster than when he hadn't been able to choose to go.

You turn around in his grip so you're facing him. His eyes are still closed, his lips slightly parted, his breath even and slow in deep, maybe dreamless sleep.

You hadn't worked up the nerve to ask him when he was leaving, either. You know it will be soon, and it's pointless to hope he'll put it off until he's forced to slip through another crack in the flow of time itself. You watch him for a moment longer and sigh, blowing hair out of your face.

You want to see him off when he goes and you're not sure you're going to get the chance if you fall asleep too late. Not when he was ready to leave without waking you the first time he had to go. At the very least, you want to give him something to hold onto in your name, to remember what he's doing for you and to remember _you_. You think of the murex hanging around your neck, the twine holding it in place almost seamless now, with how long you've worn it without taking it off.

You want him to think of you as much as you thought of him between the last you saw him and now. But what do you have that he could remember you by? You try to turn again, sighing a little more audibly, and it's followed by a yawn.

Another yawn answers you, and Jake stirs again. This time, he wakes up, muttering something you're not sure you hear until he speaks to you directly.

"You're not a very heavy sleeper, are you?" He murmurs, voice still thick with sleep. His bleary eyes half-open to look at you in the dark, the color of them lost in shadow so the pupils look almost inhumanly wide. He wraps his arms tighter around you, the two of you practically nose-to-nose, legs tangled together. His smile spreads lazily across his lips. "Penny for your thoughts? Or I suppose I should be asking for a drachma."

You glance away. Out of the corner of your vision, you think his smile falls, just a little. Somehow you find it in you to laugh, though it sounds small and fragile, almost another sigh.

"Just missing you already." You say. You turn to look at him properly again and run your knuckles lightly across his cheek, the bristles of his stubble and slightly dry skin. It occurs to you that maybe that was a bit too honest in itself, but he doesn't seem to mind just yet. You lean forward until your foreheads actually are touching and you're nose to nose. You look up at him. "When will you be going?"

He winces. Looks like he didn't want to be reminded, either. You cup his cheek and press a kiss to his lips, almost chaste, and then another, deeper, more longing. He answers with a moan, but little more than that.

"I imagine I'll spend the rest of today with you." He says, when you break off the kiss. "It's tempting to just wait here until I can't anymore, but I don't think that's fair to you. I'll be back as soon as I can, though. I promise."

You smile, tightly. You don't know how much a promise can give you, worded like that, but it's all you can do to hope for it to be soon. He pulls you a little closer and yawns again.

"Now that's settled, I think I'll get myself back into settling to sleep, too." He says, and within moments, he's snoring again. You curl your fingers in his hair and close your eyes, and slowly, fitfully, you fall asleep.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit shorter than I wanted it to be, but it felt awkward to continue on from that end point in a single chapter.

Your name is Dirk Strider and you have a small handful of regrets.

First and greatest is that you left your brother back in Thrace hundreds of years ago. You didn't know that you didn't have to, of course, but you can't help but feel like you shouldn't have done it anyway. That Jake says he's alive is confirmation enough for you that it was a mistake, and now you're trapped here, in this sun-drenched valley that would be beautiful if you weren't so utterly trapped.

Your second regret is that Jake English has to leave you again. You can't do anything about that, of course; you're the one who asked him to go, to find your brother again, for the faintest glimmer of a chance to be free. You don't know how soon or how distant a time it will be before you see him again, though, and as the two of you walk silently towards the tunnel that leads through the valley, it weighs on you in silence.

Your third regret is that you didn't come up with anything to give Jake to remember you by, not in the morning, and not in the noon, and now as the sun goes down you walk empty-handed while he carries his rucksack and the murex feels like it weighs the world around your neck with every step.

The two of you stop at the tunnel's entrance, and just as you remember, it yawns wide and hungry into the earth, like a portal to the underworld itself. You're sure that if it weren't for the signs left by those before you, it may well _be_ a portion of the underworld, full of souls lost in its twists and turns. You grip Jake's fingers a little tighter and he grimaces at the feeling, but you only loosen your hold a little.

He looks at you and shrugs the bag off his shoulders and onto the ground, taking a minute to just breathe. "It's really a thing, isn't it, that going uphill is that much harder than going down around here. It feels like this place doesn't want me to leave, either."

He fans himself with his hand and looks up at the sky. The clouds are thin and wispy, blown faint across the sunset sky, enough so that you can see the stars already lighting up the East, and the light looks watery and soft everywhere it falls. By contrast, the caverns waiting in front of you are dark and cold, and just the look of them feels like they're going to swallow you whole.

Jake must see the look on your face, because he smiles at you, weakly, and scoots over on the massive lump that makes his rucksack. He pats the spot he'd been sitting on, and you take the hint and sit beside him, leaning against his shoulder as night falls and the stars bloom overhead.

"It'd be nice, I think, to just sit here and stargaze with you for... I don't know, I can't say _forever_ , but a good long while, at least." He says, as the last of the light fades and the sky overhead brims over with flecks of light. "I imagine with you living so long ago, when the stories I know were just being made, that you could tell me something really interesting about all that up there."

He gestures vaguely to Scorpius, or what you're at least pretty sure is Scorpius from your charts but to you really just looks like a handful of sand scattered across the dark. But you make a point of lacing your hands together, and bringing one of his to your lips, like he'd done for you. You don't know the significance of the gesture just yet, but the look on his face makes your insides well with comforting warmth.

He tugs his hand away too soon, and coughs into his other fist, standing up. You stand up too and help him get his rucksack back on.

"Well, here I go." He says, facing the deeper dark of the cavern. There won't be any starlight in there, and you wonder what he'll see by until he reaches into his pocket and pulls out something the size of his thumb. He squeezes it and it glows like a lantern cupped in his palm, and he takes a deep breath and looks to you. "Anything else I'm forgetting? I'm doing this for you, after all, so don't hesitate to tell me."

You think, this is it. This is where you tell him you love him, or give him some token to tell him for you. This is where you pour out the emptiness that's been eating you from the inside out and beg for him to fill it instead with love returned. 

But you don't know that he will, and you don't know what he'll say, and your hesitation runs circles around you until you're standing still and staring at him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and shrugs, turning back around.

"Jake, wait-" It moves you, then, when he's not looking at you. You pull him back from the cavern's entrance with a hand on his arm, and before he can ask you anything, you grab him by the front of his shirt and kiss him. 

It's different from those other kisses, and you pray he can tell. You feel the edges of your fear and desperation in your throat, threatening to spill over into him. You feel yourself grasping for it, and your fingers tightening in the fabric between them, as you try to tell him everything without saying anything at all.

His hands, broad and calloused and warm, cup your cheeks as he deepens the kiss, and you feel- you don't know what it is. Something bright and almost liquid, like sunlight caught on his breath, pouring into you and spreading luminous warmth wherever it touches. You feel heat on your cheeks, almost think whatever he's pouring into you is leaking out through your eyes, that you'll be blinded. 

But no, they're just your tears. Saltwater and nothing more. Jake breaks the kiss and you gasp for air, and you almost swear there's a flash that fades from your lips when you do. You grip his wrists and sob, shoulders shaking silently, your teeth grit around the noises you want to make. He shushes you, murmuring against your hair while he holds you, while you cry like you haven't since you were a child fearing the noise outside your hut.

"I-" You stop yourself, choking on it. You shake your head, but you can't compose yourself. "Hurry back." You tell him. "Wherever- wherever you go, hurry back to me. Please."

You see his eyes are wet, too, when he pulls away from you. But he smiles like it won't take any time at all, and then he walks into the cavern with his strange little lantern, and you stand there watching until the first turn and he's gone.

You wipe your face. You still feel raw and cracked, but somehow, standing here under the starry night sky, you feel something resembling peace.

~!~

You lose track of time.

It's not so much that you lose track of the hours, but even with your calendar, even with watching the sky, it's all too easy to lose track of days at a time.

You've been stuck in routine so long that you don't remember how to do anything else. The thought horrifies you, now that you're so close to getting out of it. Now that you have a glimmer of a chance to be free, you're not sure you know how to be free.

Sometime in this fugue state, you wonder if your brother will even let you.

~!~

When you wake up and you realize another month has passed, you don't know what to do with yourself. You're not even sure why you know, deep in your bones, that it's been a month since Jake English walked out of the valley through a tunnel that never opened to anywhere else for you.

You lie there, staring up at the ceiling. It needs patching again, and there's cobwebs in the corners. You taste dust and wonder if you've lost more days to sleep than to waking.

Everything aches, but you get yourself out of bed. You run your fingers through your hair and take a deep breath, the smell of dew and nectar hanging faintly in the air. 

It tastes cool and rainy today, so you're going to have to bring your laundry inside, and make sure the chickens stay in the coop. In fact, you're already thinking of what you'll have to bring inside, where you'll have to shore up holes in the walls and ceiling, how long and how heavily it's going to rain. You feel the chill in the air and you know it's not going to be long before it starts pouring.

Actually, there's something else in the air. Something nutty, and a blend of spices, burnt and almost resinous. You sniff again, still rubbing your eyes. It smells like... rosemary? 

You don't keep rosemary in the kitchen, and it doesn't smell so strong until it's been picked. You drift towards the door as if in a dream, and you take in the smell of cooking food, and the sound of voices.

Jake you recognize immediately. The pace and cadence of his words are unmistakable, and he's the one speaking right now. You blink as he speaks over his shoulder to someone you can't see.

"I have to admit, I'm amazed at your lack of foresight for someone who quite literally sees into the future!" He says, as he's frying eggs over the stove and barely watching the sparks coming off the wood. The eggs sputter and bubble, and he ladles them- two of them- onto a plate. Oil sizzles as he cracks one more and pours it right in. "If you knew he was going to die here, if you _knew he was going to be miserable_ , I don't understand why you couldn't have just made your way over to Crete and taken him back. Surely you've explained your dreams to him? And I imagine he's believed in far stranger things than seeing the future in dreams!"

You're not sure what you feel, hearing that. Jake hadn't mentioned that your brother could see anything in dreams. You're not sure what you're feeling when you realize who he must be speaking to if he's taking this tone, either, because who else could it be?

"Didn't I explain on the way here?" Your brother snaps, and how long has it been since you'd heard his voice? He sounds different than you expected. "I don't have to explain myself to you, especially if you didn't listen the first time I did it."

Jake huffs, carrying the plate to the table. He passes you, meets your eye, and announces, "Yes, well, I'm not the only one who's gunning for an answer here, my good sir! You have quite an amount of explaining to do to your brother here, who might I remind you has been waiting a very  long time for this moment, I'm sure."

You gulp, and you turn your head to see the man who left you here so long ago. Visions flit through your head before you really take in what he looks like now, such that you expect to see a wizened pile of skin and bones, cracked feathers and missing teeth and long, white hair. You expect an ancient sage bending low over the table, staring into the depths of a cup with sightless, milky eyes.

His hair is white, like you expected, but that's about where your expectations stop being accurate. You stare, as the visions resolve themselves into the reality sitting in front of you. He sits draped over his chair, one foot resting on his knee, his face filled out and youthful and unfamiliar, so that you almost can't believe this is the same man.

But he smiles the same way you remember, when you take a step into the room proper: A thin press of the lips, in such a way that you're not sure if he's holding back disappointment or praise. A crow, almost a raven, perches on his shoulder, pecking at something in the glossy feathers lining the collar of his jacket. 

He puts down the cup he'd been drinking from, and you note that even his hands look healthier than you'd remembered them looking, the veins no longer standing out on the backs of them. He turns his head and even though you know his eyes are burnt dead, even though you know there's nothing behind the dark glass on his face, you could swear he was looking straight at you. His familiar cocks its head, its beady red eyes regarding you sharply.

"Been a long time alright." Says your brother, gesturing for you to come closer. "How are you doing, Dirk?"


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final stretch!

You stand frozen. He talks like you've only been away a couple weeks, and his voice is the same as you remember, too. The overall experience is surreal enough that you kind of just leave your mouth agape until he frowns when you don't say anything. Your skin itches with the conflicting need to yell at him and thank him for actually showing himself here.

But thankfully, you don't have to say anything at that point, because Jake comes bustling towards the two of you like a storm brandishing a wooden spatula. He gets you seated and continues chastising and criticizing your brother, who takes it all with silent, eerie grace.

You look to Jake, and finally find something to say. "How did you manage to get him to come?"

"He didn't." Your brother answers. His tone comes out bitter, and his familiar caws accusingly as he rearranges himself in his seat. "I saw him coming, and as soon as he walked through the door, I told him I was heading here already."

His tone softens, but you find yourself gripping your own cup as Jake puts it in front of you. The glazed clay is hot under your fingers, the smell of lavender tea cloying the air. Jake sets to eating his portion of fried egg, chewing slowly and trying very hard not to bring any attention to himself.

"Why." You ask. It sounds, to you, like the wet crack of a stone striking flesh.

If your brother notices, he doesn't show it, though you would be hard pressed to know if he was showing any kind of feeling besides cool contempt or a chilly kind of approval even under better circumstances. He gestures to Jake with the hand holding a cup of tea, and Jake bristles slightly, gripping the spatula like a weapon.

"Depends on what you're asking, you're not exactly making it clear with the monosyllabic questions. But if you're asking why I made it all the way here when I hadn't before..." He trails off, and takes a sip. You want to grab the cup out of his hands and force him to answer you straight for once in his life. Your hands are shaking with the urge.

But he catches on before you can turn the thought into anything else, and puts the cup down, sliding it across the table. He folds his hands in front of himself while Jake, at your side, taps the underside of the table with your spatula. The air hum with the silence, the distant crackle of embers in the clay stove.

"I thought I was doing what was best for you." He says, somberly. "I thought there would be a world for you outside of that forest, outside of that monstrous place we once called home. When I had the Dream where you died and realized my mistake, I used the one thing I knew would draw you back. I didn't know the cost."

He stills, and his mouth twists in pain, like the striking stone was made real. But he smooths it over, and adjusts the collar of his jacket, fingers parting and smoothing the dark, stiff feathers until he can speak again.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is, I made a mistake and didn't want to face it. Maybe I should've asked you if you wanted to come back, or doubled down and asked again if you really meant to go, or maybe I should have let you pass on from this world to the next on your own." He taps his fingers on the table top, almost counterpoint to the faint tapping of the spatula in Jake's hand, and frowns deeper as he slows down. "It was selfish of me, and I regret that."

You cut him off.

"You should know that it's wasn't the long years I ended up resenting you for, but that they were long, lonely, _empty_ years." You hiss. "You left me _alone_ , and you _trapped me in this valley._  What part of leaving me here with nobody so much as in the same _square mile_  seemed like a good idea? What part of leaving me nothing but- but fucking _ghosts_ seemed like a good idea to you?"

He winces, the corner of his mouth twitching. Jake looks sidelong at the two of you but doesn't interfere, not right now, and you're thankful as much as you're frustrated that he's here without butting in.

"I thought it would be better for you at the time, or at least better than dealing with whatever awful shit the rest of the world could come up with." He rubs his forehead, pinches the bridge of his nose behind his darkened glasses, and you see in him the old man you expected him to become. "Just because I see how things are going to come to pass doesn't mean I always know how to use it. I was a fucking idiot, plain and simple, and I don't expect you to forgive me for robbing you of all the world has to offer. Hindsight is always clearer, who fucking knew, right?"

You glance at Jake, and then at your brother again. Your lip trembles as you consider what to say next, and you stand up.

"You can change it though." Your palms lie flat on the table, your weight resting on them and the balls of your feet as you lean towards your brother. "Tell me you can fix this. Tell me there's a way out of here for me. You put me here and you can get me back out, right?"

"Yes. Of course; that's what I came here to do. It would even be pretty simple." You're taken aback by that answer, as he unfolds himself from his seat; but you know your brother and you know the way he says things. If it's simple, it won't be easy even for him, not if he can help it.

"What would it take?" You ask. He bows his head, just enough that you can see his burnt eyes, the sluggish way they move while his familiar whispers in his ear, as if remembering what sight was. You tap your nails on the table top until Jake puts a hand over yours, stilling you with the comforting weight of it until you realize you'd been shivering. "What would it take to fix this?"

"You'll need your soul back." He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and his familiar croons as he pets its beak, the sound lending a strange vibration to his voice. "The tricky part is finding it. If it were mine to give at this point, I'd give it to you right now and get this whole ordeal over with."

You stare blankly, horrified.

Then you're furious.

"Are you saying you _lost_ my soul?"

"What? No, that's not what I mean at all." You're not sure if you're annoyed or relieved when your brother shakes his head and gestures for you to follow him. His familiar keeps sticking its beak in his ear, probably guiding him because he doesn't use a walking stick, though he does slide his feet along the floor before taking a step. "I mean that I, personally, can't get it back. I know exactly where it is, but..."

Jake is still holding your hand. The three of you are standing outside now, walking around the side of the temple. It's a warm day, almost entirely too bright, with the buzz of insects still making the air hum like the afterimages of your lute, and sweat trickles down the back of your neck as your brother leads you to the shed. He lays a hand on the worn wood of the door, as if looking for something in the grain.

Jake breaks the silence first, the first thing he's said since fuming at your brother earlier.

"His soul has been in this shed the whole time?" He asks, letting go of your hand and stepping forward. He looks hesitant to so much as touch it, but he gets as close as he can without actually laying a hand on it. He does half a circle around it and around your brother before straightening up with his hands on his hips, frowning. "This just looks like a normal shed to me. You can't possibly hide much in it without Dirk stumbling across it at _some_ point in a couple hundred years, right?"

It should be the case, but you know it's not a normal shed. "All the corn I've gotten out of that thing over the years should have added up to a whole granary." You say. The grass rustles underfoot as you approach your brother, still standing with his hand on the door. "So what. I'm assuming the world is folded up inside that shed?"

"You'd be right." Your brother smiles. "Well, not _the_ whole world, but _a_ whole world. I always stocked it for you, and there's always been a lot more in here than you'd ever used in all this time, just to make sure."

You narrow your eyes. "So how will I get my soul out of there? It's only ever shown me a little room at a time." You move to stand beside him and Jake, suspicious of your brother, stands only a little ways off. Still within reach, but tense all over.

You thank him for that too, in your head; you don't know if you can trust your brother after everything that's been revealed to you by now.

Your brother goes quiet, forehead pressed to the wooden door like he might divine some answers from it by listening to the wood, while his familiar looks at you and Jake in turn. You could swear it's murmuring something, but you can't quite hear it and you don't want to come closer and confirm if it is.

He exhales with all the gravity of someone loosing an arrow. "Do you want to leave?" He asks you.

(You're twelve years old, shivering in a hut in the dead of winter, far to the North. Your brother has pulled you aside from three strangers who watch you with fearful, hungry eyes.)

"I won't stop you if you want to, but tell me with no uncertainty and no tie to anyone else in the world."

(His hands are heavy on your shoulders, and his face is creased at the corners of his mouth. He looks thin and worn, except-)

You blink away the visions. You're in Crete, in front of a shed behind a temple, on a scorching hot day at the tail end of summer. Your brother stands with his back straight and his voice firm, one hand pressed flat to the door of the shed, and he asks you again.

"Do you want to leave?"

Jake looks at you with a kind of stillness that you've never seen before. He might even be holding his breath. You think, you could stay forever and just wait for Jake to come back. You don't know what the world is like out there, what it will be like to grow old. You don't know if, even if your brother gives back your soul, you _will_ grow old.

You don't know if that will break the spell that keeps you, for lack of better term, alive.

You have no way of knowing.

But you look at your brother and all that he's lived without you, and you look at this place that you're so tired of. The prayers you've said out of habit rather than out of faith. The god of grey stone who may or may not be what killed you in the first place.

You take a deep breath.

"I don't want to stay."

Your brother nods and pushes the door open with outstretched fingers. Inside the shed is... just the shed, exactly as you remember it. There's nothing to suggest it's anything but an ordinary shed, except for what you know about it. Your brother steps back.

"Go inside." He says. "If you really want to go, you'll find it."

You look at him, and you square your shoulders. The shed looks suddenly more threatening than it had just a moment ago, like the opening of the tunnels but with even less promise of escape. You can see everything inside, you can see the dusty crates and sacks, the sunlight streaming through holes in the roof, specks of light dancing in the sunbeams.

"And if I don't?"

He shrugs. "You'll find a way back out, but you'll still be here."

You look back to the shed as he steps away from the opening, and you take a step forward. 

"Actually, I think you should wait just one tap-dancing second!" 

Jake suddenly grabs hold of your shoulder, fingers almost bruising-tight. You look at him, his fingers almost burning against you and you practically tear yourself away from him but he grabs you again by the elbow this time. You glare at him and he looks terrified, actually, but there's a steely determination in his tone when he speaks that surprises you more than the grab.

"I don't know if this is actually how it works, because I don't really think I have the faintest idea of how your magic shed is supposed to function, but I hear a dimension folded in on itself and a distinct possibility of getting lost in it!" He glowers at your brother, who doesn't respond, merely adjusts his glasses on his face. Jake shifts his grip from your elbow to your hand, lacing his fingers in yours. "And I think you've had enough of going at things alone, you know, so I don't want to make the decision for you, but if you're going in there, I should try to help, right?"

It puts you on the spot a little, the sudden declaration. He curls his fingers tighter against yours and grins, one of those bright, disarming smiles of his that knock the wind out of you and make you think you can have the world with him. He looks back to your brother, who stands with his hands folded in front of him, still as a statue.

"Well?" Jake says to him. You don't know what to expect. You think maybe your brother will tell him to fuck off, tell him only you can make this journey, but he says nothing.

At least, he says nothing verbally. He tilts his head very slightly, in something like a nod, and that must be enough for Jake because Jake looks back to you.

"Well, I think that's our cue." He says. "Shall we?"

You gulp, and look at the shed again. But you think this is probably better than you could have hoped, to face this with someone at your side. You hold on tighter to Jake's hand and step into the shed.

It doesn't seem very different at all when you enter at first, even when you look to your brother questioningly. You close the door behind you. Silence.

"Uh." Jake coughs into his fist. "Is that it?"

You blink, and Jake does too. 

In the space of that blink, the space inside the shed unfolds.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter! Next part is the epilogue, and should wrap up the last buzzing questions about this fic, aka, we've solved Dirk's soul issue now what about the time issue and such.
> 
> Also I apologize for the stairs joke. I saw the opportunity and couldn't miss it.

Your brother wasn't kidding. Before you'd closed your eyes, the shed was just a shed, slightly dusty and full of empty crates, boxes, and sacks. Now, you're watching it unfold in every direction, pathways and doors spaced evenly around, and each time you look through a crack in the wall, you see your brother standing guard outside.

"Well." Jake says, rubbing his palms together. "I've seen some strange things wrought by magic, but this has to be the outright strangest."

He's right. His voice echoes in this place, and you feel a chill at the thought that this has been here this entire time. You glance into the open tops of different boxes and find a lot of them empty, but a lot of them are stocked full of things you've never touched- sheets, food, spices, tools. Even clothes, and heaps upon heaps of books. Your brother made sure this place was stocked like it would have been at the temple's heyday.

"Well," You say, making sure your hold on Jake's hand is still there. "We should probably start looking."

Jake makes a face, but you pick a direction and start moving, hands still intertwined. It's disorienting to see what looks like the same walls repeating over and over, but in such a way that you can pass through gaps in them and _still_  see the world outside.

"You could spend an eternity in here if you tried to look in every nook and cranny. Do you have any ideas where he may have put it?" He says. "And how do we know we're not going around in circles? This place is making it hard to tell which way is up from down. Are those _stairs_?"

"Don't go down the stairs." You remember your brother warning you about that, downward movement spelled trouble in places where you couldn't be sure where you were, where it all ended. You hear Jake swear as something topples and crashes down. 

And down. 

And down. 

It's only when it's too far to hear that you can't tell if whatever he dropped is still moving. You look over your shoulder at him and he's still staring at the stairway in horror. "And _that's_ why I warned you about the stairs."

"Not entirely devoid of danger, I see." He says. He shudders and the two of you keep moving. Or at least, you're sure you keep moving, one foot after another. It's still just about impossible to tell how far you're going, and even worse is trying to tell if you've seen things before or if you're making any progress.

It's silent for a while, but never for a long while. Both you and Jake knock things over in equal measure, though Jake slightly more than you just because he's built broader and is wearing heavy boots. You step daintily over things spilled over that make for your only landmarks, and every so often, you peek through a crack to make sure you haven't been left behind.

"Hey, Dirk?" Jake stops moving, but doesn't untangle his fingers from yours. You realize your hands are almost too warm. "How long have we been looking around in here?"

You gulp, your mouth dry. You could step outside and end this, certainly with more ease than you would have finishing. You could try again another day, even, now that you know this place is here. 

There's a door right beside you, the temptation to turn back staring you in the face, and your brother still stands guard outside, though there's nothing to guard this place _from_. It would be so easy to just-

You shake your head. You don't think you could do this that way, not how things have gone so far. You walk out that door and the chances of you heading back in, trying this again, plummet faster than a stone in a well. And you think of Jake, and how he's come back so far, over and over, but what are the odds of him doing so again?

What are the odds of him having that choice?

"Dirk?" He puts his free hand on your shoulder, warm and steadying. Your breath comes too fast and too shallow, and the walls, even spaced out and strange as they are here, seem to be wobbling and unreal. You shake your head to clear it, and he's in front of you, both hands on your shoulders now. "Dirk, hey, look at me."

You look up at him. The light strikes across his face in a thin, blinding line over one eye and his nose, partially bisecting it. The light is faded at the edges, though, and almost orange. You realize just how dark it is. You blink. 

"It's sunset already?"

"'Fraid so." Jake's lips press tight together, his lower lip pressed down under his teeth. "You want to head back out and try again in the morning?"

"No." You sit up straighter. It doesn't fit. "No, it was morning when we came in here. We can't have been in here the whole day, right?"

He blinks, but you're right. You're not tired enough for it to have been so long. You're not hungry or thirsty or needing to relieve yourself; a little sore maybe, but nothing like that. There's no way it's sundown. You look outside again.

Your brother still stands there, and his familiar croons in his ear. You watch as he says something back, and feeds it something from his hand. You turn back to Jake, your hand on the door. The light looks weird, bent wrong, and so does he.

You realize you stopped holding his hand some time ago.

"Dirk?"

You blink. The shadows are too long, and the stripe of light that cuts across his face seems sharper; he's still Jake, but you feel the creeping sense of him not _being_  Jake, not really, not entirely. You shake your head, but it won't go away. He looks at you with something that distinctly reminds you of fear.

You look around and see nothing but the walls, the boxes, the slowly-fading light.

"Dirk, are you alright?"

He's in front of you and you lash out to strike him, a hand raking across where his face should be and going through nothing but air. The image doesn't fade, and you stare, wide-eyed, your ears ringing, as your hand passes that band of light and your hand goes through his visage like smoke.

He backs away, nearly stumbling, but you still see the smoke clear as a brand in your mind. You gulp and shake your head again, curling in on yourself. You just want to get out of here, and to never have to see this shed or this temple or your fucking brother ever again, but this is starting to sound more and more like something impossible even for you. You blink at him and your vision swims with tears and you can't even explain to yourself why. It's worse when you blink them away and the not-Jake is gone.

Your voice cracks when you try to speak, a broken noise that dies before it's even really left your throat. You try again. Again. The same result. You want to scream and it doesn't come, like your throat's closed up.

You blink and Jake is in front of you again, and this time the light moves around him instead of with him, and he's kneeling in front of you looking for all the world like he's seen something like you have. You breathe a little easier.

"Fuck- are you alright?" You're starting to really hate hearing that question but you nod. Jake doesn't look convinced, but hauls you up to your feet, and his weight beside you is warm and solid as he gets his arms around you. You cling to his side and just get your bearings back, shaking all over, and you're not sure what to say when he asks if you're alright again, or even if you can say anything.

He sighs and pats you between your shoulders, rubbing his palm into the skin. "This place is getting to me, too. Thought I wasn't going to be able to find you back there."

"I saw..." You shake your head, breathe again, breathe him in. "I saw you. Not you, but something like you. A trick of the light."

He nods, and you've never been so not reassured by someone nodding in agreement before.

"We need to get out of here." He says, still holding onto you, still almost curled over you, like something could be in here that might devour you if he let it.

You look around as you cling to him, as the world narrows down to one foot in front of the other in a maze where directions don't matter. Where all the boxes are the same, all the sacks are the same, all the fucking bolts of fabric in shimmering, unknowable colors are, to you, the same. None of it is what you're looking for and you're starting to think it isn't in here at all, and the thought weighs on you like deep water, crushing inwards until, shaking, you're on your knees again.

"Fuck." You groan, clinging to Jake as he kneels with you. You could swear your nails draw blood on his arm and you can see the pain in his face, but he doesn't dare push you away, not here, not now. He looks just as terrified as you are, and you hate that you've brought him here because you didn't want to be alone in this, that you let him, with a smile, walk into this with you.

You're about to puke, you think. You're sick with all this, when he peels your fingers off his arm, gathers your hands between his, and says, "Look at me."

You do. He looks grave. But there's a glow to him you hadn't noticed before. A _literal_  glow, the only steady light in the between-worlds gloom, centered in the palms of his hands and flickering across his lips with the pulse of seven words. "We'll get through this. We'll find it. Come on, don't give up on me now, we've gotten this far."

You blink, and the light is gone, but Jake is still there. He smiles at you and pats you on the cheek, and you feel warmth spread from that point of contact outwards, almost physical in its intensity. You breathe.

You'll find it. Your soul is within reach, you just don't know how to reach it. If you want it, you'll find it, your brother said, and you want it so much you've stuck it out this far. You want...

You don't want to go back to the temple. You don't want to be alone.

You want Jake, and to see what lies beyond this valley, and to live. You cling to him and hold onto that, let him murmur against your hair. You feel like you're breaking apart and you want nothing more than for him to hold you together.

You find, in an agony you don't quite grasp, that you want to get out of here just to follow wherever Jake may go. You don't know if you can and you don't care.

You hear a crack like lightning splitting the sky, feel the reverberations of it in your very bones, and you think, you feel, _Jake, is he hurt, is he safe, let him be safe, let him find his way home, let him bring me home, let nothing hurt him ever again, let nothing hurt me ever again,_

It stops. You open your eyes.

Jake is saying your name, shaking you in his arms, and the shed has folded back in on itself. You're sitting in the middle of a mess of boxes and old burlap and cloth, and among it, small sacks of corn, mended tools, bottles. It's cramped and dark and you can't breathe for a second, thinking you're trapped-

But there's a different weight on your chest. You look down. There's the murex on its string, and what appears to be a stone, glowing and dense, the color of sunset. It almost burns when you try to pick it up, but you bear through it and cradle it in your palm.

It twists and writhes before your eyes, until you're cupping not a stone but a handful of fire, and it seeps into your skin. You can feel it, crawling up your spine and across every vein and nerve, settling into the darkest places of you. You look up at Jake. Every part of you feels heavier, impossibly so.

He nods and carries you out of the shed, out into the blinding noonday sun where your brother kept his vigil this entire time. Jake helps you to your feet and you lean against him as you look up to your brother's face. To say you stare him down would be a bit inaccurate considering the fact that you can't see his eyes, but you do your best.

"That's it, then." He says. You expected him to sound bitter, but he sounds the same as ever. "You got your soul back. You're free to go. Where are you going from here?"

The sun beats down and you're still clinging to Jake, sweating like you've run a whole marathon and it has nothing to do with the sunlight, not this time. You gulp until you can feel your tongue again, and you glare at your brother through the light.

"Wherever I want to go, I'm guessing." You say. It sounds dumb, and you feel Jake laugh softly, though maybe he's just glad to be out of that shed. Your brother even smiles at that, or maybe it's just the starkness of the shadows over his face.

You shake your head.

You look at Jake.

"I just want to get out of here." He says, blowing a bit of hair out of his face. There's something melancholy in it as he holds you up, even with the birdsong and cicadas thick in the air. You close your eyes and hear your brother walking closer, feel him lay his hand over your eyelids. Presumably he does the same for Jake.

"Deep breath." He says.

You take one.

The world tilts sideways.


	20. Epilogue

Your name is Jake English and boy howdy has this whole hullabaloo been one for the papers. Or it would be, if any of the papers you knew would accept the piles of what sounds like complete batshittery even to you, the person who experienced nearly all of it.

To start with, you're dating someone who was once an immortal. An honest-to-goodness immortal, fetched from a labyrinth in Crete, though certainly more fetching than any Minotaur you've ever had the misfortune of encountering, literary and otherwise. You've also been spending a pretty good part of your life so far as an immortal yourself, shuttled between times near and far and entirely too interesting to be safe on the whims of a curse and without any sign of the time you've spent doing it.

Did you mention that your significant other was also under a curse of sorts? That labyrinth of his wasn't keen on letting go. You've fixed that right up, but now you have a considerably more complicated conundrum to deal with; that being, the logistics of being immortal in a world where the rest of the population most certainly _isn't_.

It's not a world you're very happy with if you're going to outlive Dirk just by virtue of hopping too far forward.

You've managed well enough with your, ahem, _tenure_ as a time-traveler and general adventurer to get some resources gathered, but you know it won't exactly be enough. Dirk's adapted remarkably well to the modern day, or at least better than you have, every time you see him, so you're not so much worried about him as worried about the fact that you can't spend as much time with him as you'd like.

It boils down to a choice, too: Do you go back to nineteen-ten, or do you stay with him here in twenty-nineteen?

Both options are generally... not perfect, by far. You're not used to this time and place, and every which way you turn, you see something that reminds you of what you well and truly know was  _home_. You're reminded of Gran, and Becquerel, and dear, sweet Halley. What sort of man would you be to forget all that?

But you can't up and leave and go back, of course. Not just because you're deeply and somewhat uncomfortably in love with Dirk Strider, though to be entirely fair that's a pretty heftily-portioned slice of the pie right there, but it's just.

You aren't the same Jake English that was sent into the future and beyond that night. You aren't the young man who was sent out to find an impossible thing in the vastness of eternity. It's not just the time away that's changed you, but the very touch of magic in your blood, the way it was woven into every part of you, the way the things you've seen and the time you've spent away is a part of you, means you can never go back and live the life you'd thought you would before.

You miss Gran and the dogs terribly, and you're sure, for the time that they lived without you, they missed you, too. But they won't stop missing you if you return- if anything, they'll see a ghost of who you could have been, and who you were, walking and talking with the same steps and cadence.

You don't think you could do that to your Gran. Not after everything you know she must have been through.

You think about it as you stand before a secret little shop in the bad side of Houston, Texas. It isn't a shop, not really, but the proprietor, as it were, does like the illusion of a little more legitimacy than he actually has. You shoulder open the door and for a moment your eyes slide off everything, but the way Dirk did his own magic, it wears off faster than it would have otherwise.

You look around and spot just the disreputable fellow you're looking for, his feet propped up on the counter and a truly massive jug of iced tea beside him, the jug so cold and the day so hot that it's leaving a veritable puddle on the table it's on. He's got a crazy straw sticking out of it the other end in his mouth, which he pulls out with two fingers like it may as well be a fine cigar.

"Thought you never wanted to see me again." He says. His head lolls to the side, his shades sliding slightly off his nose. You suppress a shudder at the sight of gnarled scar tissue. "What gives, English? And if you say it's my brother but you're not here on his behalf, we're going to have some problems."

You straighten your jacket by the lapels, thankfully un-feathered, unlike the scruffy monstrosity he insists on wearing. "It's not a problem with Dirk, actually, it's a problem that's uniquely personal in nature."

He clicks his tongue. "Erectile dysfunction; thought you're a little young for that, physically, but I guess time travel gets to even the best of us or some shit like that."

You wheeze like he'd actually socked you in the gut and he smiles with just about as much satisfaction as you expect he'd get from it. Frowning, you straighten yourself out and dust yourself off.

"Not _that_ kind of personal issue, you gutter brain." You huff, but you have to remind yourself to be a little more polite to him considering the circumstances. It doesn't improve your mood any, either, and he seems to notice that you're holding back. You narrow your eyes at him, trying to look less meek. "It's about the time-travel issue."

"Ah." He gets his feet off the counter, standing up with one hand ghosting fingertips over the edges of things around him. His feet still move in that shuffling, sliding way you saw him use a few months ago, before you'd entered into that awful kaleidoscope shed. "You finally gave up on finding that Evelyn broad's ghost."

His familiar swoops down at your head with a shriek that makes you very nearly reach for a gun that you haven't carried for quite a while now. To your credit, you don't swear this time; it's a habit you've been trying to curb, especially with how common it is in this day and age. (And also besides that, Dirk swears enough for the two of you, now that he's relaxed into life here in Houston.)

He pets Terezi across her beak and she gently nips at his finger while he leads you towards the back of his "shop". This time, you follow without saying anything, or actually bumping into anything along the way. The shape of Dirk's own magic is familiar and steady, sparking under your fingers and tongue like the fizz of a carbon drink, or the touch of static, and you hang onto that as Dave leads you deeper into the folded-in spaces of his current home.

You finally make it to wherever it is he wants you to be, and in the middle of the bare patch of floor is some kind of stone bowl. He turns around while you look over the, well, whatever it actually is, though you make sure to keep your hands to yourself. No telling what kind of malarkey he can come up with, this fellow.

"So." He says, sounding almost smug. He cracks his knuckles and his neck, loosens his shoulders in a way that makes you think he might be raring for a fight, and instead plunges his hands into the still, clear water of the bowl, which you only realize is there when he splashes it all over the place doing so.

"So." He says again. "Gotta figure out a way to break the curse. First method, how _exactly_ was it worded? You tell me that, I'll find you a loophole. Or more accurately, Terezi will find you a loophole, because she's good at that and I can't be assed."

"Well..." You bristle a little at the suggestion, but you do your best to think about it. The words slip between your thoughts like a live fish from your fingers, and you frown, trying to grab better hold. You remember that you have to find her familiar, in whatever shape it may take, in whatever time it may appear in.

Dave frowns when you're silent for longer than entirely polite and coughs, though he keeps his hands in the bowl. "Okay, don't tell me. Come here instead, I expected this method would be a little more applicable."

You raise an eyebrow at him, glancing around to see if there's anything else in the room to be concerned about, but it's just you, him, and that damned bird. You step forward until you're just across from him in front of the bowl, which actually reminds you a little of those basins they baptize babies in. That's not what it's for, right?

"Lean forward and put your face in the water." He says. You look down at his hands and notice a goldfish actually nibbling one of his fingers.

"What's the point of this one?" You ask. "Forgive me, I don't entirely want to do anything that I don't know the consequences of right now."

He shrugs. "We're gonna try to put the curse in the fish and have that be the fish's problem. Look at my hands, it's not going to fucking bite, or at least not bite in any actually harmful capacity, you dingus."

"You can do that?"

"We're at least going to try now put your head in the fishbowl." You're still a bit wary of what he's going to have that fish do, for all you know his gruesome brand of spellcasting is going to involve it eating one of your eyes or something. "Take a deep breath and hold it for as long as you physically can, you're just lucky I still have a fish to do this with." He says.

Well, you suppose you've seen weirder, especially being that you've been flung all over the place as it were.

You take a deep breath and push your face into the water, only slightly cool and surprisingly pleasant. The goldfish swims around your face in a couple of circles, which would be relaxing if it weren't for the fact that you have to focus on the fact that you're still holding your breath and Dave is putting his hands on your cheeks. You think you can hear him murmuring something above you.

He moves his hands from your cheeks and slams your head down into the bottom of the bowl. You flail.

Damn, he's stronger than he looks, too, and the water is rushing into your mouth and nose at a rate faster than you can cough it out; every retch actually gets _more_ water into you, and you can feel the stuff sloshing around your ears. You grip the edges of the stone bowl and find it surprisingly sharp, cutting into your  palms as you try to force your way back up.

Blood leaks into the water and the fish seems to take that as a signal, or maybe your thrashing is poisoning it, and you think, this is it, you're going to be murdered in the back of this shop in a fishbowl, your lungs aching with the weight of water, your eyes stinging, your mind fogging up. This was a terrible idea, why did you trust the pretense that Dave Strider would help you after everything you've done so far.

You become aware of a light behind your eyes, which is a little strange because you're pretty sure that kind of light is supposed to come from the end of a tunnel. It's comforting in your last moments, though, your arms are heavy and the edge of the bowl is digging dangerously sharp against your throat, and you think if you don't drown then Strider is going to slit your neck on the edge of this damned thing.

The light gets stronger, and there's almost no water left in the bowl. You don't feel the pressure of Dave's hands on the back of your head anymore, but you don't think that accounts for much when you don't have the strength to lift yourself anymore. You gurgle pathetically and black out.

~!~

You wake up, surprisingly, not in Heaven or (more likely) Hell, but still on the floor of the shop Dave's been squatting in. There's no water in your lungs, not that you can feel, and drool is drying on your cheek. You're pretty sure it actually happened that he tried to kill you just now, though, because you definitely have water in your hair, eyes, and clothes.

You scramble to sit up, gasping, relishing in the touch of air to your insides. It's just about the best thing you've ever had after an ordeal like that, and when you're done taking deep, gulping breaths, you round on Dave with a fury.

"You tried to kill me!" You yell in his face. "You honestly just tried to murder me! Not in any particularly sleek fashion, either, you- you- _I don't even have a word for it!"_

"Chill." He says, crouched over something on the floor. He prods it with his fingers and you realize it's the goldfish, flickering at the edges with some kind of afterimage. You're just more confused than ever, hearing him say that, actually, as if he didn't just make an attempt on your life.

"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?! If you're going to try to murder me, we ought to be doing it the proper way, not trying to drown me in a sink!"

"I wasn't trying to kill you, did you not understand the significance of anything I just fucking did?" He doesn't look up at you, but he doesn't need to. He picks up the fish and drops it back into the bowl, which has been refilled with more water and cleaned up, though you think you can see the imprints of blood on the edges where you'd gripped it too hard.

You stare, and you feel kind of pissed still, but you're not really sure what else to say. He sighs heavily and swirls his fingers in the eerily clear water.

"I did what you asked me to do." He says. Then, he smiles. "Well, okay, I tried to kill you a little, but you managed to get out of that one just fine. Something's protecting you. I don't know what it is, because you stopped breathing for a second, but then there was-"

You cut him off, staring. "There was light, wasn't there?"

He huffs. "Yes. And you can explain that?"

"Well..." You think about it, but no, you can't. "I can't really do anything about it except it shows up, sometimes, and-"

"And stops you from making a bigger mess of everything than you thought possible." You see him tilt his head. "Terezi has a few things to say about it. I don't actually care enough to elaborate. But suffice to say, your curse is in that goldfish and there's only one thing left to do."

You look down at the bowl again, at the fish still swimming in circles, albeit, now it's doing so a little more jerkily and unsteadily than it had a while ago. It even seems to be listing to the side a little. "And what's that?"

"Go home." He says. 

"What?" For a second you feel like he might have cheated you, done something you hadn't asked him to. He shakes his head.

"Get out of my shop, dumbass." He says, turning away from you. He turns around for a second. "Actually, pay me, and then leave."

You grumble something unkind, but you know what, fair is fair.  You reach in your pocket and place the thing in his outstretched hand, a murex shell wrapped in a bit of old twine. The same one you gave to Dirk, who gave it back just to ask for this.

He closes his fist around it, and turns away from you, disappearing into the corners and twists of all this junk. Blessedly, you manage to find your way back out, and outside is a very worried Dirk Strider.

"How did it go?" He asks. You smile, weakly, still soggy, and he stares you down the way he did when you'd first met, the way he does that leaves you grasping for as many words as you can get.

"I think it worked out alright." You say, straightening your jacket. It's chilly now that you aren't in there, and Dirk looks at the broken-down facade of the place with his lips twisted in something like regret. You smile at him, though it's a bitter kind of thing. "We'll see what happens. I don't know if he swindled me or not, but-"

"He wouldn't swindle you." Dirk says. His eyes pierce through you. "I just. I don't know where to go from here."

Your expression sobers up a little, and despite the fact that you're soaked all the way through your clothes, you drag Dirk into a hug.

"C'mere you." You murmur against his shoulder, gripping him tight until he stops being so tense. "We'll be fine. I know we'll be fine."

He tries to say something but stops himself, shakes his head, and pulls out of your arms. You grin at him, lopsided, trying to be cheerful for him. You feel ages old but you imagine it's worse for him, the look in his eyes some days, and you want to guide him away from that. You want the world for him, all the world that he's missed all this time.

"Come on, let's go get dinner." You say. You can start on the world with Chinese food. You don't think he's ever had Chinese food. 

You link your arm with his and hope you dry off by the time you find somewhere to eat.

 

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading this year's NaNoWriMo entry!
> 
> Special thanks to:  
> CervinePrince, my best friend, who helped me unstick bits of the novel while I was having a minor breakdown over Discord;  
> Essynkardi, my moirail, who read bits and pieces and generally motivated me to keep writing;  
> PaopuConMostaza, for taking the time to put my fic through Google Translate to read it, thereby inspiring me to keep up with my wordcount because damn that is dedication;  
> The entire "Strilondes + Friends" discord, where I live-wrote chapters 1-15;  
> Andrew Hussie, for writing the original homestuck we all know and love, because I wouldn't be writing novel-length fic in second person without that kind of inspiration;
> 
> And everyone who read, kudos'd, and/or commented on this fic, because even though I have a mini-stroke due to anxiety every time someone comments, I was really motivated by a lot of your commentary.
> 
> See you around next year!


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